


but with a whimper

by thesemovingparts



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Apocalypse, F/F, Lesbian AU, Slow Burn, both of them are in their thirties, end of the world au that no one asked for, genre typical violence, i've never written anything remotely sci fi or high concept before i'm just here for a good time!, isolated cabin lesbians, journey to safety, reluctant teammates - Freeform, the great outdoors
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:14:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15804702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesemovingparts/pseuds/thesemovingparts
Summary: “What’s it like in this place?” Trixie asked. “All alone?”“I mean out here, with nothing around for miles?” Katya breathed, an honesty in her words that even she wasn’t accustomed to. “Sometimes it feels like it never even happened.”***alternatively: the apocalypse survival story no one asked for





	1. a disrupted quiet

**Author's Note:**

> hello friends!! my name is becca!
> 
> i've been sitting on this for a minute because i wasn't sure whether or not it was worth posting tbh. it's different from anything else i've written (for this fandom or any other) so it's kind of more of a fun experiment for me than anything, but thanks for stopping by!
> 
> i honestly don't know where this came from, it just wanted to be written and so i obliged lmao
> 
> i have a lot of ideas for this universe, so here's an introduction to who these lesbians are <3 
> 
> (as always thanks to adoredykelano on tumblr for reading my things and being an all around great person)

 

**_"This is the way the world ends_ **

**_This is the way the world ends_ **

**_This is the way the world ends_ **

**_Not with a bang but with a whimper"_ **

**_**_\- T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men_ ** _ **

 

 

The end of the world, all in all, was kind of a bummer. 

There was no Netflix for one, no carry-out Thai food, no art museums or bubble baths or cheesy reality television. 

Katya even missed music, and Katya had never even really  _ liked _ music. 

But in the deep woods, far from civilization (or what had once  _ been _ civilization) Katya fought back by keeping a very tight schedule. 

This was a trait that followed her from Before, back when she was neurotic about spreadsheets and meetings with clients instead of gardening vegetables and canning jams to stock up for the winter. 

Her cabin was small but isolated, and sometimes, in the dead of winter surrounded for miles by deafening quiet and trapped by a blanket of never ending snow, she could almost convince herself that she had finally used her vacation days to take a ski trip.

Of course, Katya had no idea how to ski, but she  _ had _ recently constructed a pair of homemade snow shoes that she was pretty proud of.

Winter had come in and settled around her home with a heaviness that it hadn’t the year before, and Katya wasn’t positive, but she thought that Christmas and New Year’s might have come and gone already. She almost regretted not trying to make the place look festive. 

In reality, the longer she stayed in the cabin, the more she lost track of time. The longer she lived alone, the more she ended up talking to herself, and writing stories and drawing pictures on the backs of photographs of a happy couple to whom that cabin had once belonged.

It had only taken a month and a half for her to take a knife out of the drawer in the kitchen and messily chop her hair off at her shoulders. 

Not because she was losing any of her grasp on reality--she had far too accurate a view on the After-- but simply because it was so goddamn quiet. 

At first it had been overwhelming, with no concept of what she was doing, how she would survive, where she was, the silence of it all could easily press down on her chest and keep her hiding in the unfinished basement for hours on end. 

But eventually, Katya had learned to appreciate the quiet.

There was a very specific brand of peace that could be found in the howling winds outside her cabin, the creak of the floorboards as she swept up slowly gathering dust, the quiet sound of her own breathing late at night as she tried in vain to fall asleep. 

She was alone, and for a little while, she convinced herself to find comfort in it. 

On the days when the quiet got too loud, she told stories aloud to the candlelight as she boiled a pot of snow above a crackling fire or hummed lullabies she hadn’t heard since childhood to her overalls as she sewed patches in the knees for the third time, all as a means of creating white noise. 

But on the night that everything changed, she was quiet, absorbed in a book she had read twice already in the past six months. 

On the night everything changed, the wind whipping across the cabin was deafeningly loud, blocking out any other sound that might have been going on outside, blocking out the sound of cautious footsteps in the snow and heavy breathing outside the front door. 

Katya was wrapped up under nearly every blanket she had, seeing only by the light of candles because the sun had set particularly early on that evening due to the incoming storm. 

Katya was so comfortable that she brushed off the first knock as a tree branch, come loose and tapping against the outside of her home. 

She sat up straighter at the sound of a second knock, two in quick succession. Probably a squirrel looking for shelter. 

At the sound of the handle on her front door jiggling, Katya immediately had a shotgun she’d never fired in her hands and her boots on her feet, standing in the doorway between the bedroom and the living room, praying that she’d remembered to close the curtains. 

It had been a long while since she’d had raiders show up looking to scavenge up her resources, looking to take everything she had worked so hard to build to keep herself alive on the side of that mountain, even a year and a half After. The idea of another group having found her spot had her hands shaking on the handle of her gun. 

She tried not to think about the possibility that there was something other than a raider outside her front door. 

The door handle jiggled again and Katya creeped into the living room, stepping on the floorboards she knew would keep quiet in a child’s game of  _ dodge the landmine _ . The jiggling got more aggressive until there was a pounding, the clear sound of the sole of a boot against the wooden door trying to knock it open. 

Katya took a step back and held up the shotgun, finger on the trigger as she tried to convince herself she was ready for whatever came barreling through that door. 

_ Bang.  _

Katya tightened her grip.

_ Bang. _

Katya took a deep breath.

_ Bang. _

The door swung open and Katya took what she hoped was an aggressive step forward, only to lower her gun at the sound of shrill, shocked screaming as the figure in the doorway stumbled backwards. 

“Holy shit,” Katya mumbled to herself as she watched a bundled up, bumbling person with a thick scarf over their face fall straight backwards onto their ass and into the deep snow. 

“I’m sorry! Don’t shoot!” The voice was a woman’s, and became less muffled as she pulled the scarf down from around her mouth and held her hands up, still stuck in a two foot snow bank. “I thought it was empty, I’m not trying to steal anything!”

Katya didn’t lower her gun, stepping forward so she was in the doorway and could get a better look at the stranger, who was very clearly breathing heavily, scared out of her wits. 

Katya glanced around for a party, for anyone following behind her but only saw the quickly growing snowdrifts instead. 

“It looked like there was no one around and I was just,” the stranger continued while Katya gave her a once over, unable to gather much about her age or appearance because of the sheer number of  _ jackets _ she was wearing to battle the cold wind. “I was just looking for a place to spend the night, but I’ll keep going until I find another spot--”

“Are you alone?” Katya asked, brow furrowed because she was  _ loud. _ This woman was the loudest thing Katya had heard other than thunderstorms and wind in ages. Hell, hers was the first human voice other than Katya’s own that she’d been exposed to. 

“Yes,” she grunted, struggling to push herself up onto her feet, but only sinking further into the snow. 

Katya hesitantly lowered her gun and just watched her, frozen with the absurdity of it all that this woman, this stranger, had just  _ stumbled upon _ Katya’s cabin. This place was, by design, difficult to find, off the grid, isolated, and Katya couldn’t even begin to comprehend how this  _ loud _ woman had just happened to find her. 

“I’m sorry,” the stranger sighed. “But could you, um…” she trailed off and put out a hand, searching for help in standing back up and pulling Katya out of her momentary state of shock. 

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Katya set her gun aside against her better judgment, resting it against the wall just inside the door, and pulled up the woman with both of her hands. 

“Thank you,” she said sincerely as she brushed the snow off of her pants, the wet fabric already freezing in the frigid air. 

“Sure,” Katya said hesitantly. The woman had big brown eyes underneath her knit hat, freckles scattered across her cheeks despite the cloudy winter.

“Listen,” she looked up to meet Katya’s eyes and Katya thought she could combust at the sheer level of human connection, light years beyond anything she had experienced in months. “My name is Trixie, I’m not gonna try to steal from you, and if you have the space-- even just a shed out back so I can get out of the wind for a few hours-- I mean… I’d appreciate it.”

Katya hesitated, felt like she had maybe forgotten how to interact with people in her time at the cabin as she contemplated the situation at hand. Her fight or flight response was whipping frantically between both ends of the spectrum, creating a buzzing hum of uncertainty in the back of her brain.

“Do you have any weapons?” she ultimately asked, hand resting on the doorframe, close enough to her gun that she could grab it again quickly if she needed to. She applauded herself silently for having enough of a sense of self preservation to at least remotely keep her wits about her. 

“A knife,” Trixie said simply. “You can take it out of my boot if you want.”

“You trust me with your only source of protection?” Katya raised her eyebrows and let out a breath of a laugh in disbelief. It had understandably been a while since she’d met someone with zero intention of hurting her. 

“Either you’re gonna kill me with that gun you’re fingering or I’m gonna die from exposure out here tonight,” Trixie shrugged. “It feels worth the risk.”

Katya was taken aback by the certainty in Trixie’s voice and she was sure it showed on her face by the vague amusement in Trixie’s eyes. 

She had a few options in this moment and she bit her lip as she contemplated them. Katya could force Trixie back out into the storm, back out onto her path towards who knows what, probably facing frostbite and dehydration. On the other hand, Katya could also let her in, take the risk of letting a stranger enter the one safe haven Katya had known since this had all started. 

Katya let out a heavy breath with a roll of her eyes at herself. There really was only one option. 

“Knife first, then you can come in,” she deadpanned, holding her hand out expectantly. 

“Really?” Trixie grinned at her with those big, expressive brown eyes. 

“Yeah, hurry up,” Katya shook her head. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

Trixie lifted a foot off the ground, wobbling unsteadily as she pulled a long knife out of her sock and handed it, handle first to Katya. 

Katya looked at it with skepticism as she held it in her hands. 

“This is really all you have?” Katya looked up at Trixie with an air of disbelief, almost a laugh. “And you made it this fucking far?”

“What can I say,” Trixie shrugged. “I’m lucky.” 

“I’ll say,” Katya mumbled to herself, stepping aside and motioning for Trixie to enter as she tucked the knife into the waistband of her pants. 

Trixie stopped barely inside the entryway, mouth slightly agape as she took in the space and tugged off her thick gloves. 

“What the fuck,” Trixie breathed, not a question so much as a statement of awe. “You live here?” 

The way she turned to look at Katya with so much amazement in her voice, once again, took her by surprise. 

“More of a long-term squatter,” Katya said off-handedly as she made her way across the room and kneeled in front of the fireplace. 

She started setting up some of the spare wood she kept inside the space, contemplating whether or not to use one of her limited matches for this night before glancing over her shoulder and seeing the soaked-through, freezing girl on the other side of the room. 

She lit the match. 

“Looks like I’m not the only one who’s been a little bit lucky,” Trixie said and Katya snorted as she got the fire lit. 

“You’ve got a weird definition of luck,” she muttered to herself before glancing over her shoulder. 

Trixie was pulling off her knit cap, letting long braids fall out over her shoulders. Her hair was greasy, had clearly been tied out of her face for days if not weeks on end, and the bottom half was a much lighter blonde than the brown roots, an apocalypse-induced ombre for a girl who couldn’t continue dying her hair. 

Trixie’s cheeks were pink from the cold and Katya could tell as she stripped off her coat that she was genuinely exhausted, barely staying upright where she stood in the entryway.

“You can sit down, you know,” Katya said, pulling Trixie out of whatever moment she was in as she studied the wood paneled ceilings. 

“Oh my god,” Trixie let out a breath of relief as she caught sight of the fire, practically running to it and collapsing to her knees in front of it. Katya thought she looked like she might start crying when the warmth hit her tired face, her blistered fingers.

“Do you-- I mean,” Katya floundered with her arms crossed, staring down at this woman that was just casually taking up space in Katya’s  _ spot. _ “Do you want some dry clothes?”

Trixie’s gaze shot up to look at Katya with stunned intrigue. 

“Are you serious?” She asked, cocking her head to one side. Up close, Katya could see the dirt coating her skin, she probably hadn’t found any sort of fresh water in quite some time. 

“Yeah?” Katya shrugged awkwardly. “You can lay out your clothes to dry and borrow some of mine for the night. If you want. And you can heat up some water on the fire if you wanna, like, wash up.”

Trixie opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, looking truly conflicted with her thick-soled boots digging into her butt and her knees solid against the hardwood floor. 

“I can’t-- I just,” Trixie sighed. “I don’t have anything to trade you for any of this,” she said, guilt dripping off of her like the snow melting on her shoulders. 

“Trade?What kind of bullshit is that?” Katya snorted. “Every world economy has collapsed. Fuck trading, and take the offer,” she threw up her hands indignantly, officially moving past the  _ there’s an intruder _ part of the night and into the part where she remembered what it was like to take care of another human being.

Katya stalked away to her room before Trixie could respond, returning moments later with what was essentially one of three outfits that Katya had managed to scrounge together from fabrics and existing clothing she’d found in the cabin. 

She handed the clothes off to Trixie who was still sitting in front of the fire, some of the proper color returning to her cheeks as she warmed up. 

Trixie stared at the clothes in her hands for a moment, seemingly stunned into silence for the first time since she’d barged in. 

“What’s your name?” Trixie looked up, eyes earnest.

“Katya.”

Trixie nodded slowly to herself for a beat. 

“Thank you, Katya,” she said sincerely. 

Katya just nodded and moved towards the front door, large pot in hand with the intention of gathering up some snow for hot water. 

She had generally been nurturing person Before, and she liked to think that the After of it all hadn’t managed to turn her into a complete monster quite yet. Of course, Katya knew she was less trusting, more hesitant to help people when they showed up at her front door because ever since the goddamn world ended, people’s worst sides really had started to show. 

It’s why she was so comfortable staying alone for so long. Because at the end of the day, at least she could trust herself. At the end of the day, at least she wasn’t losing any more people if they weren’t there to begin with.  

Trixie washed up in the bathroom, spent long enough in there that Katya knew she was scrubbing every inch of herself down. She remembered the first pseudo-bath she had taken in the cabin when she had found it and really didn’t blame her. 

Katya waited on the couch, but only after she stuck a chair under the knob of the front door to keep it shut until she could fix the lock on it in the morning. She sat there, listening to the wind howling outside, and studied the knife Trixie had handed over. 

It was simple. Not more than an average steak knife that could be found in an average kitchen with a metal handle and a slightly dulled blade. Whether it had dulled from use or disuse, Katya really couldn’t be sure. All in all, it wasn’t a very interesting find and she was about to set it aside when an engraving along the handle caught her eye. 

_ June 12, 2013 _

Katya squinted at it, not sure if this would be considered snooping, but jumped when the bathroom door opened. 

Trixie looked almost like a different person. 

“I washed my clothes too,” she said hesitantly, long hair wet and falling loose around her face and shoulders. “I hope that’s okay.”

Katya nodded, taking in the sight of Trixie in her clothes. They were tighter on her but still fit well enough since they were relatively long on Katya to begin with: a men’s flannel and unisex snow pants that had been stuffed at the back of a closet when Katya had arrived. Trixie looked younger than she had before, with rosy cheeks and a bit more life in her posture than when she’d stumbled in through the front door just an hour or so prior. 

“When’s the last time you ate?” Katya asked suddenly, catching even herself by surprise. 

“It’s… been a hot minute,” Trixie said sheepishly. 

“How do you feel about canned carrots?” Katya asked, already standing and on her way to the kitchen. Trixie was hot on her trail. 

“Like a fucking bunny rabbit,” Trixie said, tone serious but a clear sense of humor hinting at the edges of the words. Katya laughed-- genuinely really laughed as she opened a cabinet filled with blank mason jars and silver cans and pulled one out. 

“Dig in, Doc,” Katya slid the can across the counter along with a spoon and Trixie didn’t hesitate in tearing it open and stuffing a spoonful into her mouth. 

She sat on a stool and moaned into each bite, practically sobbing over the cold, canned carrots as if it was the most decadent feast at the most glorious mansion on their crumbling planet. It might have been the extended solitude, but Katya was fully and completely intrigued by her, suddenly wanted to know everything about her, to  _ know _ her. 

“What’s your full name?” Katya asked, leaning back against the cabinet with her arms tight across her chest. 

“Joanne Beatrice Mattel,” she said through a mouthful of food. “But you can call me Trixie,” she grinned around a bunch of mushed up carrots and as gross as her teeth looked, covered in orange starch, Katya couldn’t help but laugh softly at her. “You?”

“Yekaterina Petrovna Zamolodchikova,” Katya said with a shrug that had Trixie’s eyebrows up in her hairline. The roots were a dark, mousy brown when they were wet. “But you can call me Katya,” she said. 

“I think I’ll sooner be calling you my guardian angel,” Trixie said. And then, after cracking her neck with a groan: “My thirty-two year old ass isn’t built for the apocalypse.”

“As someone with a thirty-six year old ass,” Katya fired back. “I have to claim senior citizen status over you, I’m sorry.”

“Fine with me, Zamo-lamo-dish-rag,” Trixie teased, shovelling more food into her mouth. Katya didn’t even have time to consider how quickly they’d fallen into an easy conversation before she was cackling. 

She hadn’t exactly  _ missed _ having people around, not when all of her recent interactions with any sort of living being had been less than tolerable at the best and violent at the worst, but she had missed laughing. There had been a time when Katya hadn’t been able to imagine a life without laughter, but she had forgotten what it felt like. 

“If you don’t slow down you’re gonna get sick,” Katya warned with raised eyebrows and Trixie groaned. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve eaten, but like, take it easy.”

“What’d I say?” Trixie said, slowing down a near-comical amount. “Guardian fuckin’ angel.” 

It didn’t take long for Trixie to finish eating after that.

It didn’t take long for her to make her way back to the floor in front of the fire with a wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and it didn’t take long for Katya to join her with two mugs of steaming, rare, decaf coffee. 

“Are you serious?” Trixie asked when Katya held the mug in front of her face. “Is this real?”

“It’s decaf, but yeah,” Katya said, pushing it closer to Trixie insistently and not sitting down on the couch until she’d accepted it, breathing in the smell of it like it was oxygen she needed to live. 

If you had asked Katya why she was being quite this hospitable with a stranger, she wouldn’t have been able to vocalize an answer. Maybe she subconsciously realized that in that new world, in the After, good things were rare. Maybe she wanted to bask in a good thing for once in her post-apocalyptic mess of a life.

“I can’t believe you have coffee,” Trixie sighed. “I haven’t had coffee since…” she trailed off, thinking about it. 

“Probably not since Before?” Katya asked, settling in on the couch behind Trixie, who still faced the fire. 

Trixie just nodded and took a slow, careful sip. 

They were both quiet for a moment, breathing in the liquid gold and basking in the warmth of the yellow fire as the storm raged outside, making the structure of the cabin creak quietly. 

“How long have you been out here?” Trixie asked softly without turning around.

“Year and a half, maybe?” Katya said. “Hard to be sure. I lost track of time a good long while ago.”

“Me too,” Trixie sighed. “Do you think we’ve made it to the New Year?”

“I feel like it’s probably February by now,” Katya responded. 

“Hmm, maybe it’s Valentine’s Day,” Trixie laughed a breath of a laugh. “Do you think They celebrate Valentine’s? Up there?”

Katya snorted. “Doubtful.”

“Fair,” Trixie chuckled softly, humorlessly. “Not like I’m celebrating down here either, I guess.”

“You’re talking to a woman who lives alone on the side of a mountain,” Katya deadpanned. “You don’t get much more  _ fairy tale witch _ than that.”

Trixie looked over her shoulder to shoot Katya a small smile at that, before turning back to her coffee and relishing in the taste. 

“What’s it like in this place?” Trixie asked. “All alone?”

“I mean out here, with nothing around for miles?” Katya breathed, an honesty in her words that even she wasn’t accustomed to. “Sometimes it feels like it never even happened.”

“I get that,” Trixie nodded. 

There was something in her voice, something that told Katya she understood what it was like to be living this life alone. Katya had no idea how long Trixie had been travelling for, wasn’t sure how to ask despite the sudden earnestness embedding itself in their conversation, so she just stayed quiet. 

It was more calming to have another person there with her than she had expected it to be, less aggravating to share her space with this woman than it had been to have roommates in college, to share an apartment with her ex all those years ago. 

Katya almost thought Trixie might be nodding off right there on the floor until she spoke up. 

“What did you do?” Trixie broke the silence, crackling orange glow of the fire bouncing off of her dirty blonde hair. “I mean, Before… Like, for a living?”

“Before surviving became the only occupation?” Katya chuckled softly as she curled her feet up underneath herself on the couch.

Trixie glanced over her shoulder with an amused smile, still fiddling with the lip of her mug, obviously savoring every single sip of the coffee she hadn’t tasted in so long.

“Yeah, I guess,” she laughed. It was quiet, their words were quiet, their laughter quiet, as if they were tiptoeing around a peak decibel that would break the comfort and warmth they had managed to build up between them. 

“I was a real estate agent,” Katya shrugged and Trixie turned all the way around where she sat on the floor at that, becoming almost silhouetted by the fire behind her, a halo of fire above her dark roots. 

“Are you serious?” Trixie gaped, a grin taking over her face. 

“Oh yeah,” Katya laughed. “I was real good at it too, had a stage name for my business and everything.”

“What? Was Zamo-lamo-dick-around too complicated for your customers?” Trixie teased and Katya  _ beamed _ , glowing with joy and laughter at this near-stranger who was so willing to make fun of the woman who had essentially saved her from a snow storm.

“Barbara Smith sounds a bit more trustworthy than that Russian hooker name,” Katya fired back. “And easier to spell too.”

“ _ Barbara?” _ Trixie had to set her mug down on the floor next to her as she flailed out a leg to kick at the couch Katya was curled up on.

“Fuck off!” Katya cackled. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“Did you have ads on bus stop benches?” Trixie asked gleefully. “Did you photoshop in a glint on those chompers?” she motioned broadly to Katya’s teeth and had Katya wheezing. 

“You’re a cunt!” she exclaimed.

“It’s only because I’m jealous that I didn’t even have that good of teeth  _ before  _ the fucking world ended,” Trixie shook her head with faux exasperation. “Fucking bitch.”

Katya just smiled, big and wide so both rows of teeth were on proud display before she took another sip of coffee. 

“What about you?” Katya redirected the conversation, falling back into the rhythm of what it was like to  _ talk to people _ . 

“High school teacher,” Trixie said simply, smiling softly down at her hands as though just remembering it for the first time. 

“What did you teach?” Katya asked, finding herself to be genuinely curious, to genuinely care about Trixie’s past and how she’d ended up travelling down that mountain alone in the middle of winter. 

“Physics,” Trixie said and Katya raised her eyebrows.

“Damn. She’s educated,” she chuckled. And then, gentler: “Do you miss it?”

Trixie drew in a sharp breath through her nose and bit at her lip.

“Every goddamn day,” she said, voice so soft it cracked under the weight of her words. 

“Yeah,” Katya sighed as she pulled a blanket higher in her lap. “Me too.” 

And she did. She really did miss all of the open houses, the picky clients, and the houses that refused to get sold. She missed the long hours and the shitty boss, she missed dressing living rooms and sticking signs in front yards. 

She missed a life outside of the After. 

She missed freedom. 

“We’re gonna get back to that,” Trixie said with a quiet certainty, a soft determination that caught Katya off guard.

“Are we?” Katya asked with a furrowed brow. 

“The world has ended a dozen times and--”

“Never like this--”

“And we  _ always _ come back from it,” Trixie pushed on insistently. Katya couldn’t believe the hope that she still had in her words, couldn’t believe that anyone still alive at this point could have any hope left. 

“This is different,” Katya fired back. “This is how we go out, I think.”

“Then why are you still here?” Trixie’s eyes shot up combatively to meet Katya’s. “Why are you still fighting?”

“I’m actively  _ not _ fighting,” Katya chuckled. “I’m keeping to myself. I’m going out on my own terms and not those of some fucking--”

“You were ready to shoot an intruder,” Trixie let out a baffled laugh. “You’re still fighting, Katya.” 

“And you’re naive if you think anything we do will un-end the world,” Katya shot back. 

“Maybe so,” Trixie shrugged. “But I’d rather die trying.”

Katya downed the last sip of her coffee with a disbelieving shake of her head and set the mug aside, trading it out of her hand for Trixie’s knife instead.

“Get some sleep,” she said over her shoulder on her way to her bedroom. “And don’t touch my shit.”

Katya didn’t believe that anyone was coming to save them from any of it. Katya believed that they would all end up dead and rotting and worthless because, well, because of the goddamn apocalypse. 

It really was kind of a bummer, but that didn’t make it any less true. 


	2. an altered plan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Some of us want to do more than hide out for the rest of our lives,” Trixie muttered, moving a few books to look behind them on a shelf. “Some of us haven’t fully given up yet.”
> 
> “Educate me then,” Katya shrugged, just enough mocking in her tone to make Trixie stand up straighter. “What exactly are you doing to save the world?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello again!!
> 
> thank you so much to everyone that left comments, it really means a lot to me and was endlessly helpful in actually getting this chapter down on paper. i'm jumping so far outside my narrative comfort zone so please maintain your suspension of disbelief and thanks for allowing this self indulgent story <3

_ “I’m not going to be late!” Katya laughed into her cell phone, speeding down that road in her red car, one hand on the steering wheel as she careened around tight corners and through the tall trees.  _

_ “Yekaterina, your mother has been planning this party--” _

_ “I have one more open house and I  _ promise _ that I’ll make my flight on time tonight,” Katya insisted. “You guys act like I’ve missed every flight I’ve ever booked. _

_ She rolled her eyes because she had in fact, only missed about fifty percent of the flights she’d booked.  _

_ Katya’s father sighed on the other end of the line.  _

_ “It’s just very important to her that you  _ be here _ for this,” he said. “It’s-- Anniversary-- And I just--” _

_ “You’re breaking up, Dad,” Katya cut him off. “I’m losing service out here, but I’m gonna be there on time-- Early, even!” _

_ “Okay-- Love-- Katya,” his voice crackled through her phone.  _

_ “Love you too,” Katya said as she hung up and tossed her phone into the passenger seat, taking note that she was very rapidly losing service out in the woods. She’d have to find an upside to that when she tried to sell this place.  _

Solitude! It’s good to disconnect from everything sometimes! Don’t you want a break from being  _ on _ twenty-four-seven?

_ Katya was good at her job. Someone was gonna end up living in that cabin when she was done with it. _

 

Katya had a relatively regular body clock, woke up with the sun each morning at pretty much the same time.

She didn’t have an alarm, no way to ensure that she woke up on time, but also nothing to wake up  _ for _ on most days, so it was a system that worked. 

The day after Trixie arrived on her doorstep, however, Katya was awoken by  _ noise _ for the first time since a raccoon had found its way into the walls of her house a few months prior. 

“Oh, shit,” Trixie’s voice echoed from the living room. “Fuck-- Fucking-- Goddammit!”

Katya shot upright and stumbled out of bed, assuming the worst as she heard the creaking hinges of the front door swinging open. She rushed into the living room just as Trixie was setting the chair that had acted as a lock all night aside and a pile of snow slid inside and onto the floor.

“You’ve gotta be fucking  _ kidding me,” _ Trixie groaned, already dressed back in her own clothes with her hair tied into two long braids. 

“Jesus, I thought someone was breaking in,” Katya sighed, rubbing the sleep out of her tired eyes. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Trixie said hurriedly. “I was just—”

“Were you trying to sneak out?” Katya asked with a soft laugh. 

“No!” Trixie said far too quickly. “I was just checking on the weather. Hoping to get back on the road today.”

“Doesn’t look like there’s gonna be much of a road out there,” Katya looked pointedly at the shin-deep wall of snow in front of the door before sliding it shut and sticking the chair back under the knob to keep it closed.

“Yeah,” Trixie grumbled, biting her lip and crossing her arms over her chest like a pouting child.

“What? You missing a hot date or something?” Katya asked, confused by the hurry Trixie seemed to be in when there wasn’t anything left in the world worth hurrying for. “Gotta catch the big game on TV?”

Trixie shook her head in frustration as she dropped her backpack on the floor with a thud. 

“Are you just gonna call me naive again if I tell you?” she responded with a huff as she started walking around the room, searching the shelves inexplicably. “As if I’m not a grown adult dealing with the same fucking shit you are?”

“Seems like we’re dealing with slightly different shit if you’re actually trying to go back out into that mess,” Katya deadpanned. 

“Some of us want to do more than hide out for the rest of our lives,” Trixie muttered, moving a few books to look behind them on a shelf. “Some of us haven’t fully given up yet.”

“Educate me then,” Katya shrugged, just enough mocking in her tone to make Trixie stand up straighter. “What exactly are you doing to save the world?” 

Trixie shot her a look of annoyance over her shoulder. 

“Come on,” Katya laughed. “Not like you’re ever gonna see me again once you leave this place, right?”

Trixie hesitated, turning back to the shelves but stalling her movement for a moment.

“I’m going to DC,” she said eventually. “There’s a group of women up there, trying to put some of the pieces back together.”

Katya felt the smirk on her face slip from her lips and fall somewhere into the remnants of melting snow resting at her feet. She cleared her throat. 

“Like, a government?” she asked, trying not to notice the sudden intrigue, the tinge of what was dangerously close to  _ hope _ marring her voice. 

Katya hadn’t even let herself consider that there were still other people out there. She’d been alone for so long that she just… assumed she  _ was _ alone. 

“Eventually,” Trixie shuffled through a stack of CDs. “Right now they’re mostly trying to help people get back on their feet. Putting together medical facilities, refugee camps, even a school. People are living in malls and hair salons but it’s  _ something,”  _ she huffed with frustration as she slammed yet another picture frame back down on the shelf.

“What the hell are you looking for?” Katya asked, effectively hiding how stunned she still was at the news that there were people somewhere— a community, building themselves back up.

“You don’t have a radio in this place?” Trixie threw her hands up indignantly. 

“No,” Katya shook her head, knowing if she’d have had a radio, things might have turned out a bit differently for her. 

“How do the type of people that keep guns and this much canned food in their cabin not have a fucking emergency radio—”

“I mean, they did,” Katya shrugged. “It was already broken when I got here.”

Trixie looked at her with wide eyes, a sudden brightness overcoming her entire stance.

“Well why didn’t you  _ say _ that?” Trixie laughed. “Where is it?”

“It’s in the basement but it doesn’t  _ work—” _

“Broken can be fixed!” Trixie said gleefully, already halfway to the basement door. “Broken doesn’t mean irreparable!”

Katya let out a heavy breath, exhausted with the events of the day already despite only having just woken up. 

There was a refugee camp. That meant there were refugees, that meant that people were still alive, that she wasn’t as  _ alone _ as she had thought. 

She shook out her hands. 

She followed Trixie towards the basement.

  
  


_ Katya had to switch off the radio once she got into the densest part of the forest, the static becoming overwhelming and frustrating. Instead, she hummed to herself as she swung around wide curves in the road, ready to sell this cabin, ready to fly home and see her family for the first time in two months.  _

_ This part of West Virginia was beautiful, and it had made selling homes around and amongst the mountains a piece of cake, but she was ready for a little bit of time off, to see her parents on their anniversary and catch up on some sleep.  _

_ The trees were a beautiful, vibrant green and Katya was in a great mood. Content, warm, happy.  _

_ It wasn’t necessarily a rare feeling for her, but it was fresh enough for her to be able to feel it fluttering at the bottom of her lungs like the excitement she got as a kid before a trip to visit her cousins in New York City.  _

_ The first flash of light across the sky caught her off guard. There were no clouds and no sign that a storm should be rolling in, and she craned her neck to look out the windshield for any sign of  _ anything  _ that might have caused what she could only comprehend as blue lightning. _

_ Katya just kept driving, passing it off as a trick of the light through the trees, until it happened again, this time accompanied by a rumbling in the ground, the trees, the very crust of the earth. _

_ “What the—” _

_ She was cut off by a third flash, this time followed immediately by a cracking tree falling straight down into the road in front of her. Katya slammed on her brakes, tires screeching against pavement as she watched the smoking lumber topple and on instinct she swerved to avoid crumpling the front of her car into the massive trunk. _

_ She screamed as her car went flying, flipping over itself into the brush-filled ditch on the side of the road. _

_ Her ears were ringing.  _

_ There was another flash of blue light.  _

 

“I’m telling you, I’ve tried to figure it out dozens of times,” Katya sighed, leaning against the cement wall and watching Trixie tinker with the radio on a work table in the makeshift workshop that was the basement. “It’s not gonna work.”

“Just gimme a minute,” Trixie muttered, tongue poking out just slightly as she concentrated on the task at hand.

“No offense, but this really isn’t worth your time,” Katya insisted. “I used to be a handyman and I couldn’t figure it out.”

“You don’t have to watch,” Trixie muttered. “No one’s asking you to stay for this.”

Katya rolled her eyes, not wanting to admit that Trixie kind of had a point. But what was she supposed to do? Let a stranger mess with her shit unsupervised?

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re stubborn?” Katya asked. “You’re not gonna—”

“I have a master’s degree in mechanical engineering,” Trixie cut her off with a bitter laugh. “I just need you to shut up for ten minutes so I can find the problem.”

Katya opened her mouth as if to respond, closed it in sudden contemplation with a furrowed, brow, and opened it again, this time in confusion.

“Wait, are you serious?” she asked. “You said you taught high school, I don’t--”

“A master’s is plenty to teach teenagers,” Trixie said off-handedly, seemingly realizing she wasn’t going to get any sort of peace  _ or _ quiet and continuing to tinker with the radio anyway. 

“Exactly,” Katya snorted. “If you had the option-- And you’re so into this whole  _ changing the world _ business,” she motioned broadly at Trixie’s entire self. “I mean, why wouldn’t you do something bigger? More ‘important’?”

Katya knew Trixie would be able to hear the air quotes without ever looking up from her work. 

“Contrary to popular belief,” Trixie fired back. “Teaching is the most  _ important _ work in the goddamn world.” 

“You teach kids with that mouth?” Katya joked with a smirk. 

Trixie set down a screwdriver she was holding and looked at Katya, mouth agape. Katya thought that maybe she was mad, somehow even angrier than she had been just moments before, until Trixie threw her head back in the most boisterous display of amusement Katya had seen in longer than she could recall. 

It was, to say the least, delightful.

 

_ It really wasn’t a joke.  _

_ The sky was falling and the world was burning and as much as Katya wanted to believe it was some sort of elaborate prank, she knew that it wasn’t. How could it be when she was this terrified?  _

_ How could it be when she wasn’t fucking laughing? _

_ Katya stopped at the edge of the treeline, high heels long forgotten behind her and pencil skirt bunched up awkwardly around her waist, bike shorts peeking out underneath.  _

_ She had been running, for how long she couldn’t be sure and in what direction she didn’t care, just  _ away _ from the fire and brimstone falling upon her from the sky.  _

_ The tops of the trees were burning, a bright orange that sent smoldering embers floating down like some hellish snowstorm. Katya stopped to catch her breath when she saw a small pub down the country road from her.  _

_ She took a deep breath, not certain if she would be any safer there, not certain of  _ anything _ as she gathered up the air and the courage to sprint across the road. The bottoms of her feet were torn up and probably bleeding and she didn’t care, couldn’t feel it past the pumping blood in her ears and heart.  _

_ “Help!” She pounded on the locked, wood door. It wasn’t until that moment that she noticed the tears streaming down her face, out of shock more than anything else but thick in her throat and trembling against her cheeks all the same. “Open up! Please!” _

_ Katya didn’t know if there was anyone inside, didn’t know if they’d bother helping her even if there were, but she also didn’t know what other option she had left.  _

_ Her car was in a ditch somewhere miles back, the forest was burning, and she was pretty sure she’d seen an actual fucking spaceship, so all rules were kind of out the window at that point.  _

_ “Please open up!” Katya cried out once more, praying for an answer.  _

_ She wondered briefly why she had ever stopped taking her anxiety medication, until she was startled backwards by the door swinging open and a hand grabbing her roughly by the front of her shirt.  _

_ “Shut up and get in here,” the stranger dragged her inside, immediately shutting, locking, and barricading the door behind them. “Fucking loud as shit, you’re gonna draw too much attention.” _

_ Katya was stunned into silence, taking in the space around her and the three other people occupying it. The television was on but muted, subtitles raking across the screen rapidly while everyone sat at the bar with eyes glued to it.  _

_ Katya tugged at her skirt, pulling it back down properly over her thighs with shaking hands because she wasn’t quite sure what else to do.  _

_ She watched the woman who had let her in-- short with red hair and donned in worn-out overalls with a name tag reading “Ginger”-- as she walked back to the bar.  _

_ “Did I miss anything?” she asked as she sat down next to what appeared to be her only two patrons-- one young woman dressed head to toe in high fashion and another dressed more practically, camera resting on the bar next to her.  _

_ “They’ve lost contact with the UK--” _

_ “And Mr. Fucking President is nowhere to be found.” _

_ Katya watched from a distance, still trembling and almost afraid to look at the television, afraid of what it had to tell her.  _

_ “Are the phone lines still down?” Ginger asked. _

_ “Yeah, Violet’s been checking every few minutes,” the camera woman sighed. “I’ll go try again though,” she stood up and made her way behind the bar.  _

_ “Where are they reporting from now?” _

_ “West Coast mostly,” Violet explained without breaking eye contact with the screen. “The more cities that get hit, the fewer updates we’re getting--” _

_ “Where has been hit?” Katya felt the words tumble out of her mouth before she even had the chance to think about them. “Boston?” _

_ She hadn’t even considered that this was happening anywhere else, that it wasn’t somehow an isolated incident, a warning set off in the mountains before They started taking down cities.  _

_ Violet turned around in her seat, clearly startled by the new addition to the group. Katya could tell she was scared too.  _

_ They were all just scared.  _

_ “I think the real question is where  _ hasn’t _ been hit at this point,” Violet deadpanned. “The whole world is burning.” _

 

“Didn’t you say it would only take ten minutes?” Katya sighed. It had been closer to twenty and she was now seated on the cold floor, back pressed up against a concrete wall. 

“I would’ve thought a woman who’s been living alone in the woods for a year and a half would be more patient,” Trixie chuckled, seemingly unconcerned with the task at hand. 

“Oh, I was super patient when I thought I was one of maybe a dozen people left alive on the goddamn planet,” Katya said. “But now you’re telling me there are  _ colonies _ of some sort? There’s a fucking  _ hospital _ in this place you’re going?” 

Trixie turned to look at her, pausing her work as well as the knee that had been bouncing with a concentrated rhythm. Something in her face softened and Katya wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“Did you really think that?” Trixie asked, furrowed brow accentuating faint wrinkles in her face. Katya vaguely wondered if they had been there Before, if Trixie had really smiled enough in thirty short years to already have laughter lines. 

“Think what?” Katya retorted in confusion.

“That there was no one else left?” Trixie spun a screwdriver between her fingers absentmindedly. 

“I mean…” Katya hesitated, looked away from Trixie so she wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. “I had no way of knowing either way.” 

“Christ,” Trixie mumbled to herself. “So you just-- You just stayed out here? Accepted it was over? Planned to live out your life like this?”

“Planned to live out my life like this until I ran out of food,” Katya shrugged. “Then I was gonna down every bottle of pills left in the medicine cabinet upstairs and die peacefully in my sleep.”

It felt casual to say it, maybe because she had known that was her plan for so long or maybe just because everything violent had become inherently casual in the After. 

Trixie was quiet for a moment, a heaviness in the air before she rolled her eyes and snorted. 

“Two years ago I would’ve reprimanded you for that joke,” she said as she turned back to her work. 

Katya nodded to herself. “It wasn’t a joke,” she said simply. 

A beat. 

“I know.”

Something about the way she said it, quiet and without judgment, made Katya believe her. Something about the way she said it made Katya believe she  _ understood. _

 

_ “I don’t understand--” _

_ “There’s nothing to understand, girl,” Ginger cut Katya off, who was frantically dialling phone numbers to no avail.  _

_ None of her calls were going through, none of her calls were going to _ ever _ go through. _

_ “Why can’t anyone just explain what the fuck is going on?” Katya threw her hands up in shaky exasperation. She wasn’t crying anymore, but her heart was beating faster than it ever had and she thought that it might actually explode at any minute if she couldn’t get her family on the phone.  _

_ “Because no one knows!” Ginger exclaimed.  _

_ “But we know who They--  _ what _ They are,” Katya continued. “Someone out in Area Fifty-fucking-one should have some idea how to stop this before it gets worse, right?” _

_ “What I don’t understand is  _ why us?” _ Violet chimed in. The camera woman-- Whom Katya had learned went by Fame for some ungodly reason-- actually snorted at that. _

_ “Vi, we took Their people prisoner,” Fame said. “They’re retaliating.” _

_ “Against the whole  _ planet?!” _ Violet slammed a hand down on the table. Katya didn’t blame her, would be going for a run to work off all the extra adrenaline if it had been an option.  _

_ “Could we maybe not have a moral debate right now?” Ginger let out a frustrated breath. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” she motioned to the television set.  _

_ Everyone immediately shut up as they took in the footage on screen with wide eyes.  _

_ “The speed at which They have managed to bring down most major infrastructures on the east coast and middle America is astonishing,” the newscaster said, put together in a tailored pantsuit but with fear in her eyes as she watched the clip playing behind her on a loop. _

_ “Holy shit,” Katya breathed.  _

_ There was fire, explosions, people running through the streets as skyscrapers came tumbling down and subway trains derailed in clip after clip of pixelated cellphone footage.  _

_ “Their weapons seem to be based in technology unknown to any nation’s military forces,” the newscaster continued. “I don’t-- This is,” the station cut away from clips back to that poor woman, doing a job she hadn’t signed up for. Covering stories she’d never wanted to cover. “I don’t even know how to report on this. It’s a free-for-all.” _

_ All four women in the bar stared at the screen in stunned silence, not even bothering to protest when Violet turned the volume up to two bars so they could actually hear history being made.  _

_ So they could hear how the end of the world was being covered in real time.  _

_ “Jessica!” a voice from behind a camera at the news station called. “We have to go-- We’re evacuating.” _

_ “No, Jacob, we have to--” _

_ “This isn’t the time to be a martyr!” A man-- Jacob-- rushed onto the set and grabbed her hand. “We have to move.” _

_ “I-- Shit,” Jessica muttered, looking between Jacob and the camera as crew members rushed around the set-- a real clusterfuck. “America, I’m so sorry. Be careful, be safe-- just-- Take care of each other,” she said as she rushed off the screen.  _

_ The broadcast cut to a screen advertising technical difficulties. _

_ The room went quiet as their only source of information went dark.   _

_ “What now?” Katya asked, breaking the silence.  _

_ No one had the chance to say anything before a whirring sound zoomed through the air above their hideaway, followed by an earth-shattering explosion.  _

_ One of the walls of the bar caved in, glasses fell from their shelves to shatter on the floor, and light fixtures clattered against each other as all of the women flinched or screamed or ducked. _

_ Katya and Ginger scrambled under the protection of the bar just as a second explosion erupted next to them. Katya’s ears were ringing and her hands were shaking as she watched Fame be flung backwards by the force of the blast, a wooden beam toppling over and crushing her against a table. _

_ She scanned the room frantically for Violet as the ceiling opened up to the sky, adrenaline overpowering the utter shock at watching a human body practically snap in two, only to find her stumbling across the room towards her friend.  _

_ “Wait!” Katya called out, moving to stand up and being pressed back into her hiding spot by Ginger as a flash of blue light, a beam not unlike a thing of science fiction, struck Violet in the center of her chest and sent her crumpling to the ground. Motionless.  _

_ “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my  _ god,” _ Katya said through heavy breaths, back pressed up against the wall.  _

_ “Fucking alien invasion, you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Ginger muttered, but the level of complete terror in her voice wasn’t lost on Katya. She felt it too, after all.  _

_ “What do we do?” Katya turned to look at her newfound companion with wide eyes.  _

_ The ceiling above them creaked precariously where the hole was slowly growing. A few shingles fell into the bar and Katya felt her heart speed up so quickly she wasn’t sure if it was even beating at all anymore.  _

_ “Run,” Ginger grabbed Katya by the arm and dragged her up off of the floor. “I think it’s time to fucking run.” _

 

Eventually, Katya quieted down and just watched Trixie work. Her hands were nimble, clearly skilled, but covered in chapped and blistered skin. Her nails had clearly been either broken or chewed all the way down and her knuckles were littered with small cracks, filled in with scabbed, dried blood. 

Katya twisted a piece of her hair in between her fingers with nervous energy because she had so many questions and no concept of how to ask them. Or maybe, she just didn’t know the right questions to ask. 

“It’s not some big, new society,” Trixie said quietly, as if she could read Katya’s mind and was presenting this new information for her sake. “At least, not that I know of,” she shrugged without looking up. 

“What do you mean?” Katya asked, hugging her knees up to her chest with finger tips digging into the fabric of her pants. 

“I don’t want you to think there’s this whole city that I’m heading towards,” Trixie explained, almost sheepishly if Katya could imagine that woman as anything other than bullheaded. “I barely even know what’s going on, I’ve only been in contact with them once before, but you have to understand,” she sighed, trailing off. 

Katya bit her lip. 

“I do,” she said with a short nod, and then a beat later with a sigh: “Last night, I didn’t mean to--”

“It’s okay,” Trixie cut her off, understanding radiating back and forth between the two of them the same way it had over two cups of decaf coffee the night before. “I think we should all get a pass for being a little on edge. Y’know… considering.” 

Katya expelled something of a surprised, huff of a laugh at that, catching even herself off guard as she watched a faint smirk play at Trixie’s lips in profile. 

In just over twelve hours, Katya had already been on such a rollercoaster of emotions, one that she probably couldn’t have processed properly even when she had been a regular person living a regular life with friends and a family and rent to pay. 

She had no real concept of what Trixie was doing or how far along she was in her task, but knew that something new was happening when Trixie pushed her chair away from the table and held her hands up slowly. 

“Did you--”

“One minute,” Trixie cut her off, leaned forward and flicked a couple of switches. Katya’s jaw dropped open as she watched the red power bulb light up and Trixie begin to bounce with nervous, excited, hopeful energy. 

“Holy shit, oh my god,” Katya scrambled up off the floor at the same time that Trixie shot out of her seat and leaned forward to press down the call button on the radio. 

“Hello? Is anyone out there? DC? Anyone?” Trixie said frantically into the radio before letting go of the button and waiting a moment. 

They both stood silently, Katya rocking backwards and forwards on her toes, half believing that no one was going to answer and half believing the aliens themselves would pick up the call, discover them, and kill them on sight. 

“Are you sure--”

“Shhh,” Trixie shushed her before pressing down on the switch once more. “This is Doctor Joanne Mattel. We’ve spoken before and I’ve just found another radio. Please respond if you can hear me. Over.” 

Katya could only see Trixie in profile, but even so, she could feel the anxiety radiating off of her. 

It felt like the seconds stretched on for hours, like the two of them were staring at that red light for so long that their crow’s feet grew at the corners of their eyes and their already stringy hair began to gray. 

And then they heard the static.

Katya reached up with a sharp intake of breath and wrapped her fingers around Trixie’s bicep. Trixie didn’t complain. 

“Doctor Mattel, are you still there?” a voice crackled through the speakers. “The weather is affecting our connection. Over.”

“Yes! Yes!” Trixie practically  _ squealed _ into the microphone, bouncing on the balls of her feet while Katya cut off the circulation in her arm. “You’re coming through. I’m here, I’m here, fuck, I’m  _ here. _ Over.” 

Katya watched Trixie’s shoulders fall lower than they had been the whole morning, relief spreading across her face and out through her breath. 

“It’s good to hear from you, Doctor,” there was obvious relief in the other voice as well. “This is Peppermint, we spoke last time you were able to make contact with us. Can I ask your new location? Over.” 

“I remember, it’s good to hear your voice,” Trixie said, a bubble of a laugh erupting up from her lungs, almost manic. “We’re somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains, I’ve been finding my way towards y’all as well as I can. Over.” 

Katya raised her eyebrows at the use of  _ we. _ Trixie didn’t notice, too caught up in her own giddiness. 

“How are you faring out there? Staying warm? Over.”

“As warm as possible,” Trixie nodded. “Hit a bit of an obstacle though. I don’t know if last night’s snow storm hit you at all, but we’re snowed in. Over.”

“How bad is it?” Peppermint questioned through the crackling connection. “Do you have somewhere safe to wait it out? Over.” 

That moment was the first that Trixie turned her head, looked Katya straight in the eye as if she was questioning, as if she almost wasn’t sure if she was  _ allowed _ to stay in the cabin until the storm passed and the snow melted. 

Katya wondered briefly if Trixie genuinely thought that Katya had it in her to send a stranger out into the below-freezing temperatures, into the wind with no real hope of finding another place to hide away for at least a few miles. 

But Trixie looked hesitant, so Katya moved her hand from Trixie’s bicep and used it to press down on the finger that Trixie still had resting gently on the call button as she waited for confirmation from Katya. 

“We’ll be safe until the weather passes,” Katya said confidently. “We’re pretty isolated but this cabin is sturdy enough,” she let go of the call button but then floundered and pressed it down again. “Oh, uh. Over?”

Trixie watched her with intrigue and gratitude behind big, brown eyes. Katya cleared her throat and pushed her hair behind her ears with fumbling hands. 

“That’s good to hear,” Peppermint pulled them out of the moment and both of their gazes shot back to the radio on the desk in front of them. “Keep us posted and let us know when you start in this direction again. Over.”

“Copy that,” Trixie said with a nod. “Over and out.”

The deep breath that both women took then was nearly in unison, would have been if Katya hadn’t held hers in her chest as her mouth fell open slightly and she searched, grasped for, foraged for words to express how she was feeling. 

There had been another  _ person _ on the other end of that conversation. A person who knew about Trixie, who knew they were stuck in the storm, who was quite simply  _ aware _ of their existence on the side of a mountain in the middle of the winter. 

It was weird to be known. It was new to have someone miles away asking for updates. 

It was overwhelming to be cared for. 

“I need to sit down,” Katya ultimately said, pushing past Trixie and back up the narrow staircase into the living room. 

“Are you--” Trixie cut herself off and chased after Katya when she saw her shaking her hands out, shaking off the pure  _ energy _ that had found its way into every nerve ending all the way down her arms and legs and fingertips. 

Katya was already collapsing back into the worn cushions of the couch when Trixie closed the door to the basement behind her and leaned back against it. 

“That was real,” Katya breathed quietly, more to herself than to the room at large but Trixie nodded nonetheless. 

“Yeah,” Trixie said, trying and failing to hold back a grin. “Yeah, it was.” 

 

_ Katya hadn’t ever been much of a runner.  _

_ Sure, she had always been in good shape, managed to maintain at least a fraction of her athleticism from high school gymnastics and did yoga on the weekends, but running was a different story entirely.  _

_ The tricky part of the running was both the burning in her feet and legs, and the fact that neither her nor Ginger had any clue where they were going, where they needed to be, where was  _ safe.

_ They had decided to follow parallel the path of the road as best as they could, stay under the cover of trees as much as possible, and only take limited breaks.  _

_ “What’s the plan here?” Katya asked, chest heaving as she leaned against the bark of a tree and Ginger sat on a nearby stump. “Where the fuck are we even going?” _

_ “The plan is to stay alive, bitch,” Ginger said through equally labored breathing, glancing up into the sky periodically.  _

_ They didn’t talked about the fact that they had just watched two women die. They didn’t talk about the fact that they could very well be next. They didn’t talk about how absolutely, completely, all-encompassingly terrifying it all was.  _

_ “Where did They go?” Katya asked as she followed Ginger’s gaze up into the trees, bright sunlight filtering through leaves and basking them in a green glow that on any other day might have been soothing. “Maybe They-- I mean, if we’re lucky--” _

_ “Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” Ginger cut her off with a tense look.  _

_ Katya let out a huff of breath and slid down to sit in the dirt in response. She studied her feet, torn up and bleeding, and hissed when her hand brushed against the blistering callouses. She was covered in dirt and felt like she was gaining a new mosquito bite every thirty seconds and in all the hours of shitty science fiction she had watched, they never discussed how muddy everything would get.  _

_ “I’m gonna check the road,” Ginger said after they had both managed to catch their breath, lungs still aching but no longer desperate for oxygen.  _

_ “What?” Katya’s head shot up as she watched Ginger creep towards the tree line. “Stop that!” she hissed.  _

_ “It’s fine, it’s not like they’re waiting right past the trees,” Ginger said over her shoulder.  _

_ “Don’t be fucking stupid,” Katya said as she stood up, wincing at the raw pain in her feet and following Ginger at a slow, hesitant distance.  _

_ “I just want to see if I know where we are,” Ginger said before she peeked out past the edge of the forest to the dirt road. _

_ Katya cracked her knuckles anxiously as she watched Ginger turn her head back and forth a couple of times, just waiting for something to come raining down on them, for a fucking spaceship to land in front of them, or the tops of the trees to burst into flames again.  _

_ She didn’t think she could ever forget what that blue light looked like, and she was expecting more and more that it was going to be the last thing she ever saw.  _

_ “We’re still on the main road,” Ginger startled Katya out of wherever her head had gone. “There should be some more buildings up along here if we keep going a bit farther.” _

_ Ginger started creating a new path for them, pushing branches out of the way so they could continue forward, but Katya just stood there and felt her jaw drop. She felt like an idiot.  _

_ “The cabin,” she said softly to herself. _

_ “What?” Ginger turned to look at Katya over her shoulder and stopped when she realized Katya wasn’t moving. “Are you coming?” _

_ “The cabin,” Katya said more confidently, meeting Ginger’s eyes with her own wide open, awestruck expression. _

_ “That doesn’t mean anything to me,” Ginger looked at her with confusion.  _

_ “I was coming up here to sell a cabin, it should be-- I don’t know if it’s nearby but if we can get there,” Katya’s words were tumbling out of her mouth more rapidly than even she knew they could. “I mean, if we can get to the phone, maybe clean up a little bit…” _

_ “You’re just thinking of this  _ now?”  _ Ginger deadpanned. “Really?” _

_ “I’ve been a little goddamn preoccupied,” Katya fired back, knowing neither one of them was so much angry with the other as they were with the fact that they were stuck in this situation to begin with.  _

_ “Do you remember the address?” Ginger asked with a huff of breath. “I know the area pretty well, I can probably get us there.”  _

_ “Yeah, yeah, I should um,” Katya squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose as she tried to claw through the many events of the day to recall the address she had typed into her GPS earlier that morning. “I know that I know it I just--” _

_ She cut herself off the second she heard the more and more familiar sound of something flying past them overhead. Her and Ginger’s faces both turned frantically to the sky before making eye contact and silently agreeing it was time to keep moving.  _

_ They moved as quietly as they could, with twigs snapping under their feet and leaves rustling against their shoulders. The crunching beat harmonized with trilling cicadas in the trees and Katya could hear her own breath, heavy and loud against her eardrums as she followed a handful of feet behind Ginger. _

_ She thought maybe they could make it, maybe they could find a place to hide out until this all blew over, prayed to a God she didn’t believe in that they would find their way out of the woods and back to a world where she just had to sell some fucking houses.  _

_ They weren’t quite so lucky.  _

_ Katya didn’t even have time to duck before a small explosive dropped twenty feet ahead of them, lighting up their path in a violent spray of fire and earth. Her heart was in her throat as she threw up her hands to shield her face from the shrapnel, feeling the heat of a growing fire even from that distance.  _

_ Only when she brought her arms down to scan the area did she notice that Ginger was no longer in front of her.  _

_ “Ginger!” she screamed, voice cracking in insurmountable fear as she heard a second bomb drop behind her. She whipped around to see that it was farther away, but that the fire was growing and may soon trap her in her spot if they didn’t  _ move. _ “Ginger!” she cried again, scanning the area for any sign of her companion until she finally caught sight of her: limp and slumped awkwardly against a tree trunk, leg bent at an angle that made Katya’s stomach twist and a dangerous amount of blood in her hair.  _

_ She was sliding to her knees with her hands on Ginger’s shoulders when the third bomb went off.  _

_ She was shaking Ginger, screaming in her face to  _ get the fuck up _ when a burning branch snapped from its trunk and landed heavily on the ground next to her.  _

_ It was the most anticlimactic yet dramatic thing to ever happen to her. Katya didn’t understand it and didn’t want to, but knew in her heart that there was no waking Ginger up.  _

_ Her heart was racing faster than she knew it could when she dived below the large root sticking up from the ground, huddling into a small ditch as the chaos began to die down.  _

_ Katya felt herself begin to cry despite every inch of her wanting to push forward. Her body shook and her breathing was shallow as she tried to stay quiet, even though after a few minutes she knew They would be gone for the time being. That seemed to be the pattern, at least.  _

_ Twigs and dirt dug into her shoulder blades and she inadvertently swiped mud under her eyes as she tried to wipe away her tears.  _

_ She had woken up that morning to a world where all she expected to do was sell a property and fly home, but had instead watched three women die.  _

_ Katya repeated their names in her head over and over and over again, knowing that their families deserved to know their stories, knowing that she would never forgive herself if she forgot them.  _

_ Her tears weren’t going to slow any time soon as she continued to crouch in that ditch, but the longer she was there the more she knew what she had to do.  _

_ Katya had to keep moving.  _

_ She had to find that fucking cabin.  _

  
  


“So,” Trixie broke the tense silence, the overwhelming buzzing in Katya’s head with a heavy breath. “Anything else I can fix for you since it looks like I’ll be here for a little while?”

Katya looked up from her seat on the couch, startled out of a information-overload-induced stupor and met Trixie’s eyes to find just a hint of relief mixed in with all the clear frustration.

She had massive, brown, expressive eyes, and Katya could objectively see that with a little bit of proper grooming and soap, with a diet that consisted of real food more than twice a week? Trixie was a beautiful woman, if not always the most tactful. 

But then again, did tact really have any sort of place in a post-apocalyptic society? Was there really even such a thing as a “society” anymore?

“Girl, look around,” Katya let out a huff of a laugh. “Everything in this place is some level of broken.”

Trixie leaned back against a bookshelf and crossed her arms over her chest, tapping her toe against the floor and looking distinctly like a puppy that hadn’t been let out of her kennel in too long. 

“You get lonely one day and tear the place apart or what?” Trixie cocked her head to the side with the faint ghost of a teasing smile. 

Katya bit her lip to hold back a grin. Coping with unfortunate situations by making jokes about them had always been  _ her _ thing, but she was noticing that she didn’t particularly mind sharing it with Trixie. For now. 

“They were selling the place,” Katya shrugged. “Anything worth taking they’d already taken home or sold. The rest of it is just staging.” 

Trixie furrowed her brow in confusion for a moment before realization passed across her face. 

“Realtor,” she nodded, pointing a finger at Katya in understanding. 

Katya pointed back at her in a similar fashion. “Engineer? Apparently?” she questioned, not without humor. 

“I tinker,” Trixie shrugged slyly. 

Cocky bitch. Katya loved it.

“But if you’re an academic can you really…” Katya made as if she was searching for a tactful way to say it, mocking her. “I mean, can you really do any of this?” she motioned broadly to the domestic tinkering tasks of a cabin in the woods. 

Trixie’s jaw dropped just enough that Katya knew she’d managed to rile her up. 

Katya had maybe not had any sort of proper entertainment in longer than was healthy, because she could feel herself getting giddy by the jitters in her fingertips and fluttering of her heart. She was having  _ fun _ messing with Trixie. 

The world wasn’t as  _ over _ as she had thought and she was having fun and Katya was  _ sweating _ despite the cold because it was all a lot to handle in one sitting. 

“Gimme anything busted in this place and I’ll fix it,” Trixie said with a determined spark in her eye. Katya wondered if Trixie was  _ feeling _ everything as fully as she was, if Trixie was sweating with antsy energy to get going despite the week or so they had ahead of them, still locked together in that cabin. 

If the scenario wasn’t quite so life-or-death, Katya thought it might make a good rom-com plot. But alas, the planet had still been ravaged by fucking aliens so she didn’t think there was much of a market for it. 

“Okay, okay, um,” Katya looked around the small living room, trying to think of what would be the most difficult item to challenge her newfound roommate with fixing. 

She stood up and paced, studying the shelves and mentally cataloging everything broken that had stumbled into her possession while Trixie watched her with amusement. 

“Wait!” Katya’s eyes lit up and she dashed into the bedroom. 

Trixie watched her go with bewilderment, a level of energy in Katya that hadn’t been there earlier in the day, that hadn’t been there in months. 

“Where are you going?” Trixie called after her. 

“Follow me!” Katya poked her head back out of the bedroom door and motioned frantically for Trixie to join her. 

Trixie rolled her eyes and pushed herself off the bookshelf with a snort. “If this is your way of getting into my pants…” she muttered as she walked into the room, trailing off when she saw Katya beaming and motioning grandly to a large, antique record player. 

“Do you accept this challenge?” Katya raised her eyebrows, hands landing on her hips with a flourish that she hadn’t used since the last time she’d needed to sell a house that was less than ideal to a couple that probably could have done better. 

Trixie narrowed her eyes at Katya and surveyed the project set before her. 

“It’ll take me longer than the radio,” she said hesitantly. 

“You said  _ anything _ in this house,” Katya fired back. “You could fix  _ anything. _ Don’t pussy out.”

That had Trixie rolling her eyes.

“I can  _ do _ it,” she insisted. “I just need a few days.”

Katya nodded as she glanced out the window, frosted around the edges and frozen shut. The snow had piled up high around the house and trees hung heavy with the weight of it all around them. The sun was glinting bright off the shimmering sight and Katya thought that for once, maybe she could find the beauty in it. 

She turned back to Trixie with a shrug and a smile. 

“You have until the snow melts.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there will be more trixie in the next chapter, i promise!
> 
> comments are always appreciated and you can come say hi on tumblr @ ourforgottenboleros <3


	3. a storm passed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How have you been here alone, with nothing to do for this long,” Trixie talked to the ceiling but not without her usual amount of hand choreography accompanying her words. “And not gone absolutely, batshit crazy?”
> 
> “Awww,” Katya sighed in mock flattery. “It’s so sweet that you don’t think I’m crazy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi hello i'm sorry this took so long! 
> 
> life is crazy so writing has been going slow, but i can't thank you guys enough for your comments and for being so patient with me. 
> 
> this chapter is a little all over the place and i'm nervous about it but i finished it and i hope you like it <3

_ “Please tell me there’s coffee left in that pot, Bob,” Trixie sighed, letting the door to the teachers’ lounge fall shut behind her.  _

_ Bob turned to look at Trixie over his shoulder with raised eyebrows as he finished pouring himself a cup. _

_ “The day hasn’t even started yet and you already have that  _ long-day-of-work _ look in your eyes,” he said, already pulling Trixie’s mug out of the cabinet above the coffee maker and filling it with the last of the coffee in the pot.  _

_ “They were doing live coverage on the hostages last night,” Trixie said as she collapsed into the nearest uncomfortable plastic chair, pushing the sleeves of her cardigan up and feeling the belt cinching her slacks around her waist digging into the flesh of her stomach as she slouched. _

_ “Right,” Bob nodded, setting down both their cups of coffee as he took the seat across from Trixie. “So you pulled an all-nighter instead of getting some sleep and catching up on the news this morning?” _

_ “History is being made, Bob!” Trixie insisted, not for the first time and certainly not the last. “Don’t you care at all?” _

_ “Oh, I care a lot,” Bob smirked at her. “But I know that I can show up and get the low down on all things Alien from you every morning.” _

_ “I despise that you’re using me,” Trixie said, brandishing a finger in Bob’s direction. “But I  _ will _ tell you everything about the hostage situation.” _

_ “So, you’re still calling Them hostages, huh?” Bob asked, leaning back and sipping his coffee.  _

_ “Our government is still holding intelligent life forms against their will to study them instead of trying to communicate and learn from Them, huh?” Trixie fired back with a fire that had Bob chuckling at her predictability.  _

_ “You don’t need this,” he reached out and played at taking her coffee away but Trixie held it close against her chest with a melodramatic gasp.  _

_ “How dare you, I would die without coffee,” she shook her head frantically.  _

_ “You’re so naturally caffeinated,” Bob laughed. “I’m gonna stop saving it for you in the mornings.” _

_ “You wouldn’t dare,” she said with mock seriousness, both of them knowing that particular course of action would never actually keep her from coffee.  _

_ “How about this,” he leaned forward on his elbows. “I won’t get between you and your fix if you stop trying to teach my class instead of your own.” _

_ Trixie’s brow furrowed at that in genuine confusion. _

_ “What do you mean?” she asked settling back into her seat comfortably once more.  _

_ “I was grading a bunch of my kids’ current events essays,” Bob said. “And I was gonna get on them about sharing sources, because most of them used the same three or four articles.” _

_ “Okay?” Trixie furrowed her brow, not yet sure how this piece of information was relevant to her in the slightest. _

_ “But then I found out,” he pressed on, wide and accustory grin on his face. “That the reason they all had the same sources is because you’ve been printing out articles for them and bringing them in to your class every day!” _

_ “I’m a science teacher!” Trixie cried indignantly.  _

_ “You’re a  _ physics _ teacher!” Bob fired back with laughter in his tone. “Don’t take my thing from me!” _

_ “It’s just a very important thing,” Trixie pushed on. “And I wanna make sure they’re talking about it and forming their own opinions on it.” _

_ “I know, I know,” Bob said sincerely. “Just watch yourself or you’re gonna get reprimanded for being too political in class again.”  _

_ “Me? Political?” Trixie said in faux surprise. “Unheard of.”  _

 

Trixie started working on the record player halfway through her first full day at the cabin. 

Katya watched from a corner of the king-sized mattress, book open in her lap but her eyes trained instead on the meticulous work of Trixie’s fingers. She would take pieces apart and adjust them, put them back together again and run test after test that Katya didn’t have any understanding of but found oddly relaxing to watch.

This was essentially all they did for three days straight, taking time away to update Peppermint on the status of the weather (no longer storming but not melting away yet either) or eat vegetables and beans out of cans. 

Sometimes Katya would read, listening to Trixie mumble under her breath about something indecipherable, but sometimes Katya would draw. She sketched an abstract view of what they could see out the bedroom window: trees weighed down with snow and a sparkling sun coming up from behind the clouds. 

If you didn’t consider the disintegrating nature of their world at the bottom of their mountain, it might have almost been peaceful. 

“Do you even have anything to play on this, or am I repairing it for no reason?” Trixie asked out of the blue, looking up from her seat on the floor and pulling Katya’s gaze back to her. 

With the new knowledge that they would be stranded for a while, Trixie had let her hair out of its tight braids and the brown roots hung flat around her eternally rosy cheeks, blonde ends frizzing up down by her waist. 

“Hmm?” Katya hummed in response absentmindedly, not quite fully registering what Trixie was asking her. 

“Like, are there any records in this place?” Trixie laughed softly at Katya’s wide-eyed expression. “Something to actually listen to?”

Katya pushed the cookbook she was using as scratch paper out of her lap and stumbled off of the bed with less grace than a startled cat, crouching on the floor in between Trixie and the bed without explaining herself. 

Trixie just watched on with amusement as Katya crawled halfway under the mattress, ass in the air alongside a few grumbled curses as she bumped her head against the bed frame as she crawled out, a box of dusty records in hand. 

“Ta-da,” she motioned broadly to them unenthusiastically. Trixie gave her a once over before throwing her head back in a full-bodied laugh. “What?” Katya asked, feeling Trixie’s joy become contagious and unable to keep from chuckling herself. 

“Nothing,” Trixie threw her hands up and let them fall back down into her lap with a shake of her head. “You’re just… very unique,” she shrugged, still grinning. 

Katya’s jaw dropped open. 

“Oh, bitch,” she laughed. “You’re one to talk with this hair,” she motioned to the distinct line halfway down Trixie’s back where brown and blonde met. 

“At least mine isn’t three inches longer on one side,” Trixie fired back, cocking her head to one side. 

Katya lifted her hands to twist at the ends of her hair on either side of her face, which were in fact, distinctly different lengths. 

“It’s post-apocalyptic-chic,” Katya shrugged and had Trixie laughing all over again. 

“Oh my god, just show me the stupid records,” she said with a grin. 

“Right,” Katya sat back on her heels and began digging into the box. “A Lesley Gore album, a single of  _ Locomotion, _ a couple of Christmas albums…” Katya listed as she pulled them out and handed them to Trixie. “And… ABBA?” she laughed to herself. 

“Who  _ were _ these people?” Trixie asked, motioning broadly to the room as a whole. “Aren’t we in the country? Shouldn’t they have something more folk-y?”

“I didn’t know them well, but I can tell you they weren’t exactly patrons of the arts,” Katya responded, still studying the back of one of the Christmas albums. “Not really music connaisseurs.”

Trixie’s head shot up to look at her with a furrowed brow. 

“You knew the people that lived here?” she asked, effectively reminding Katya how little they really knew about each other. 

“As much as a realtor can know their clients, I guess,” she shrugged. “I knew more about their financial situation than their musical interests-- This doesn’t even have  _ White Christmas _ on it? What a rip off,” she held up the record, cutting herself off in such a way that made it obvious she didn’t particularly want to talk about those people or how she had ended up living in their home. 

Trixie cleared her throat and looked back down to the records in her hands.

“They probably didn’t even listen to these,” she said simply. “It was all for show and not actual enjoyment.”

“That’s actually spot on,” Katya let out a breath of a laugh, relieved to be moving on from their moment of brief sincerity. “Are you judging their musical tastes so you don’t have to finish this?” she teased.

“Oh, I ain’t no quitter,” Trixie said defiantly as she turned back to the task at hand. 

Katya watched her, with her thoughtful movement and the way the gears were moving behind her eyes, and settled in on the floor next to her. 

“Didn’t think so.”

 

_ “Ooh, this is such a good one.” _

_ Trixie leaned over her sister’s shoulder to look at the photo pulled up on her phone. It had been taken earlier in the day, camera held high above the heads of a never-ending crowd of protestors. Trixie smiled faintly at the sight of picket signs, of fists held in the air, of children on their parents’ shoulders.  _

_ “You should send that to me,” Trixie said, turning back to the television playing in front of where they were curled up on the couch, Amelia’s feet up on the coffee table next to discarded, empty margarita glasses. _

_ Anyone that looked at them would be able to tell they were sisters, even with Trixie’s bottle blonde hair versus Amelia’s deep brown braids hanging down past both of her ears. They held themselves the same way, with shoulders pressed back and a hard-earned confidence in their posture. They had the same big, brown eyes and the same smattering of freckles across the bridge of their nose.  _

_ They had the same intense empathy in their hearts.  _

_ “Wait, look,” Trixie nudged her sister as she grabbed the TV remote and turned up the volume.  _

_ On it played their regular news station, hosted by a woman named Jessica from a studio in Los Angeles whom the two of them had discovered shared most of their political views.   _

_ “Protests have erupted nationwide once again today,” Jessica said from behind her desk. “Scientific communities across the country are calling for the US government to halt studies being done on the extraterrestrials in their custody.”  _

_ “That’s us!” Amelia looked up from her phone to watch clips of crowds everywhere from DC to a small town in Montana. “I wonder if they have any footage from Nashville.” _

_ “I wonder if they have any responses from Congress on the issue,” Trixie responded. “I wanna hear their justification for this mess.” _

_ “You  _ know _ their justification already, Trix,” Amelia deadpanned.  _

_ “They didn’t even have weapons! They were clearly just on an exploration mission and didn’t expect to immediately be taken prisoner by the locals-- We didn’t even try to communicate with them at all and--” _

_ “I agree with you!” Amelia cut her off with a laugh. “Cool your jets, Captain Planet.”  _

_ Trixie let out a heavy sigh and rested her head on her sister’s shoulder. Sometimes she looked at everything going on in the world, at the violence and fear and hatred, and couldn’t help but be utterly exhausted by the whole lot of it.  _

_ “I know,” she said quietly. “It’s just frustrating how little they care.” _

_ “But that’s why we keep fighting, right?” Amelia wrapped a steady arm around Trixie’s shoulders and held her close. “Keep fighting until how much we care becomes impossible to ignore.” _

_ “Right,” Trixie nodded, turning her attention back to the television and an image of the National Mall, filled to the brim with protestors. “Just keep fighting.” _

 

It took six days for Trixie to fix the record player. 

Six days of watching the snow melt and freeze back into ice, six days of canned meals and nights by the fire, six days of Katya sketching on the back of recipes she never would have been able to cook, even if she had found that particular cookbook before she’d become the Laura Ingalls Wilder of the apocalypse. 

Katya was scooping what was left of the snow gathered on their front porch into a large pot so she could boil it for drinking water when she heard it for the first time. 

For a moment, it was faint enough that she could have easily convinced herself that it was all in her head, it wasn’t as if she had spent a year and a half in a cabin alone and  _ hadn’t _ heard things that weren’t actually there. 

But then it grew louder as she crouched in the shrinking snow banks, it grew clearer and crisper and more  _ real, _ until the front door was swinging open and music was flooding out of it, a bouncing Trixie in its wake. 

Katya’s mouth fell open in a stunned, boisterous laugh as Trixie began to dance and lip-sync in the doorway, braids whipping around her face every time she moved her head. 

“ _ The history book on the shelf,” _ Trixie sang out loud, pointing at Katya with one hand and bouncing one heel against the floor as if she was an actual chorus member of  _ Mamma Mia _ . “ _ Is always repeating itself!” _

“Oh my god!” Katya cried out, just taking it all in. 

The unencumbered  _ joy _ radiating off of Trixie, a woman who logically she probably never should have met should everything not have fallen to pieces, was contagious. 

“Come on!” Trixie motioned for her to come back inside, never ceasing her bouncing and dancing and flailing arms the entire time. “Come dance!”

“I didn’t peg you for much of a dancer,” Katya said as she stood up and brushed snow and mud off of her knees and shins. 

“I fixed your fucking record player,” Trixie said with her hands on her hips expectantly. “The least you can do is dance with me.” 

Katya looked between her interrupted task and Trixie, stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips expectantly. 

“Fine,” Katya let out something between a sigh and a laugh. “But I have to warn you of something first.”

“What’s that?” Trixie cocked her head to the side in questioning. 

“I’m very,” Katya started to sway, not quite to the beat but somehow still musical all the same. “ _ Very _ good.”

Trixie threw her head back and cackled straight up into the sky, hands clapping as she began to join in on the dancing. 

Neither one of them really had any rhythm, and they only knew every other word to the song, but they danced around each other as if it was the only thing left in the world that mattered-- and maybe it was. 

At some point, Katya pulled Trixie towards her, hand in hand with a soft grip on Trixie’s shoulder and Trixie’s touch on her waist. They spun each other, Trixie dipped her backwards and almost sent her tumbling towards the floor, the music played on and on and on through the entire album, and both of their hearts felt warm for the first time since the beginning of winter. 

Something about ABBA, something about dancing, something about Trixie was melting the ice in Katya’s brain and letting her see past the snow that had blocked her vision for so long. 

It was nice. 

 

_ “This is not a time for nice, Amy,” Trixie said as she scrambled across the living room and closed the curtains, the sounds of screams, of explosions and revving engines filtering in from the street. “William, will you please tell your wife--” _

_ “Do not try and gang up on me!” Amelia cried out in exasperation. _

_ “We’re not ganging up on you!” Trixie replied, already digging through the drawers of her sister’s kitchen as if she might find a solution to their problems amongst ladles and strainers. “We’re just trying to get out of here quickly and you’re not helping.” _

_ “Ames, please, just listen to Joanne--” _

_ “I will not listen to Joanne!” Amelia fought back at her husband, who was stood with a duffle bag full of canned food and bottled water, hastily slid off of shelves the moment they had realized they couldn’t stay. “We aren’t just running away from this-- We can’t just  _ leave.”

_ “Amelia, the only thing that’s gonna happen if we stay here…” William started, only to have Trixie cut in.  _

_ “We’re gonna die, Amy,” she deadpanned, stopping her frantic movements to look at her sister with sincerity. “Your neighbors’ houses are on fire, They’re dropping bombs in the cities, and if we don’t try to get somewhere more rural? We’re gonna die here.” _

_ Amelia met her sister’s gaze, a heavy quiet overcoming them for a beat and letting the wreckage going on outside their front door filter in through cracked windows.  _

_ “We were supposed to keep fighting,” Amelia said simply, barely a breath of a statement that had Trixie seeing her sister as vulnerable for what might have been the first time in her life.  _

_ “Maybe this is how we keep fighting,” Trixie shrugged.  _

_ Amelia took a deep breath and let it out in a huff, letting her hands fall against her thighs and looking around.  _

_ “What needs to go in the car?” _

_ “Food, water, anything that could be used as a weapon,” William nodded to her, dropping his duffel by the door.  _

_ “You guys don’t have any secret guns I don’t know about, right?” Trixie asked, looking at the sorry set of wedding knives laid out neatly in the drawer before her.  _

_ Shiny and beautiful, but the engraved date-- June 12, 2013-- wasn’t going to be any help to them.  _

_ “Of course not, Trixie,” Amelia huffed, grabbing a fire extinguisher out of a nearby closet. Trixie didn’t know how useful it would be, knew her sister didn’t either, that they were both just fumbling to find their way through it all.  _

_ “Just figured I’d ask--” _

_ Trixie was cut off, quite simply, when the world imploded.  _

_ Or, maybe more accurately, the ceiling.  _

_ She let out a shrill scream as the sky came tumbling down and the walls on the other end of the house blew out, leaving her ears ringing and her heart pounding.  _

_ Trixie grabbed ahold of the nearest knife in the drawer as some sort of security blanket, knowing it wouldn’t actually do much good against a bomb but needing to feel like she was doing  _ something _ productive amongst the fire and brimstone.  _

_ “Amy!” she yelled through thick smoke as it filled the living room. _

_ “I’m here! I’m okay!” Amelia called back in between coughs, stumbling around the corner for Trixie to see a cut in her shoulder, staining her shirt in blood, but still alive nonetheless.  _

_ “We have to go, grab the bags that are already packed,” Trixie said, rushing towards the front door. “We don’t have time--” _

_ “Where’s Will?” Amelia cut her off frantically, voice cracking.  _

_ Trixie froze where she stood, looking across the wide living room-- the largest room in the house-- towards the hallway William had disappeared down just moments before, now filled with smoke and collapsing in on itself.  _

_ “Will!” Amelia screamed, running straight into the crumbling wreckage.  _

_ “Amy, wait!” Trixie called after her, noticing cracks forming in the drywall around the front door and the ground shaking as another bomb fell somewhere in the distance. “Fuck,” she muttered to herself, not even quite able to hear it properly past the newly acquired tinnitus in her ears.  _

_ Trixie rushed after her sister as well as she could, stumbling through smoke and feeling breathing get more difficult the closer she got to her sister’s bedroom.  _

_ She heard Amelia’s anguish before she even rounded the corner-- an earth-shattering, mournful scream.  _

_ “Amelia--” she cut herself off when she stepped into the hazy room, wrecked and burnt, an entire wall collapsed on top of a motionless William.   _

_ Trixie had known from the start that the whole mess of it-- the alien hostages, the government intervention, the protesting-- it would have to come to an end eventually. But looking at her sister, screaming with fat tears running down her face, clinging to the body of her husband with white knuckles? _

_ That wasn’t the end she had expected.  _

_ That wasn’t the end she had been fighting for. _

 

Eventually the dancing had to come to an end, and eventually the two of them had collapsed in the living room as the record played to its end, crackling on the player with no music left to play. 

“A year and a half?” Trixie said out of the blue as she laid on the floor by the fire, staring blankly at the ceiling. 

Exhaustion had overtaken them quickly with little food for energy and the extra work their lungs were already doing to keep them warm despite the frigid temperatures. The fire was small, both of them realizing they didn’t have access to the outdoors to acquire extra wood and would need to make what they had last for as long as the snow continued to trap them. 

“What are you on about?” Katya turned her head lazily from her similar position on the couch. 

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed in silence, but she had to clear her throat to get rid of the crackling in her voice. 

“How have you been here alone, with nothing to do for this long,” Trixie talked to the ceiling but not without her usual amount of hand choreography accompanying her words. “And not gone absolutely, batshit crazy?”

“Awww,” Katya sighed in mock flattery. “It’s so sweet that you don’t think I’m crazy.”

Trixie turned her head towards Katya then, shooting her what was clearly meant to be an exasperated look but deflated with a snort of a laugh. 

“What I  _ mean _ is,” Trixie continued insistently. Always insistently. “You haven’t gone searching for other survivors. You’ve been content enough here.”

“I don’t know if  _ content _ is the right word,” Katya turned to lay on her side, face buried in a pillow and blanket up around her chin as her hair came loose from its ponytail and hung freely around her face. “I may not have spent the past year trekking cross-country, but I’ve seen just as much shit as you have to still be alive right now.”

“No-- I know-- I didn’t mean…” Trixie said hurriedly as she propped herself up onto her elbows before eventually trailing off. 

“It’s okay,” Katya gave her a small, reassuring smile, no joy in her eyes but no anger either. “I know what you meant.”

Trixie nodded slowly in understanding before laying her head back down on the pillow beneath her, letting the comfortable silence overcome them once more. 

As the sun set behind the clouds, the fire was their only source of light and Katya watched the shadows shift and disappear slowly across the floor. 

She glanced at Trixie periodically, noticing that even in moments of relative peace, there was always movement to her being. Whether it be a bouncing leg, a tapping foot, or, as was the case on that night, fingers tapping against her stomach, Trixie never stopped moving. 

Katya could sense her restlessness, could even vaguely remember how it had felt the first few days she had spent in that cabin, anxious to get out and find people and fix it all in whatever way she could. 

Katya recognized it because maybe, just maybe, she was starting to feel it again.

She watched Trixie’s fingers drumming out a beat on her rib cage, studied her silhouetted figure on the floor, felt oddly connected to her just from the simple sight of it.

“Why don’t you go by your first name?” Katya blurted out, but Trixie just gave her a confused look at the sudden questioning as if she didn’t quite register it the first time. “When you introduced yourself, Beatrice was your middle name, I just…” Katya trailed off from her explanation when understanding passed across Trixie’s face. 

“My first name is Joanne,” Trixie said. “But my family always called me Trixie growing up. Like, once I was old enough to have a personality, it just fit better I guess?”

“Okay,” Katya nodded along, trying to encourage her to keep going. 

“I never questioned it, really,” Trixie continued softly. “I was Trixie and  _ Joanne _ is just what it said on my birth certificate all through grade school, high school, undergrad,” she shrugged. “But then I started applying for more serious engineering positions, grants, programs when I was getting my master’s and Trixie was just a little too…” 

Katya chewed on the inside of her cheek, suddenly understanding exactly where Trixie was coming from. 

“Too girly?” she finished for her and Trixie just laughed bitterly. 

“Turns out  _ Joanne _ sounds more professional,” Trixie deadpanned. “Especially when you can apply as  _ Joe _ and make them pay attention to your application for an extra thirty seconds, actually see how fucking qualified you are. By the time they figure out you added the extra  _ e _ , you’re already in the room. Already a finalist.” 

“So it worked?” Katya asked, feeling illogically attached to the name  _ Trixie _ , protective of it from the assholes who wouldn’t take her seriously. 

“Sometimes,” she responded sincerely. “But I always told myself that one day I would be in charge and I would make everyone call me Trixie. Just so they were real fuckin’ aware their boss was a girly-girl.” 

Katya’s lips stretched into a wide grin, and she could see Trixie trying to hold back an equally gleeful smile as she stared at the wood paneling of the ceiling above them. 

“And you told Peppermint your name was Joanne…” Katya trailed off in question.

“Didn’t know who would be on the other end of the call when I first reached out,” Trixie shrugged. “Figured I might as well stick with the professional name until I knew who I was dealing with.”

Katya just nodded in understanding in response to that, seeing the logic in that decision for a woman who seemed to be able to switch her perspective, her attitude, her demeanor based on which name you called her.  

A brief silence overtook the room, only broken by a loud, almost comical yawn escaping Trixie’s lips. 

“Bedtime?” Katya asked with a soft laugh, watching Trixie stretch out her legs all the way through her socked toes. 

“Probably,” she responded through a second yawn. “Do you have any extra blankets I could borrow? It gets pretty cold out here overnight.”

Something about that startled Katya, because although she knew just how cold that living room could get late at night, she hadn’t taken the time to consider how miserable it would be for Trixie to be sleeping on the couch every night. 

“Oh, shit, you must be freezing out here,” Katya sat up, looking at the stack of blankets on the couch that would have been enough had they lived in a world with proper heating systems. 

“I mean it’s cold,” Trixie shrugged. “But it’s cold everywhere.”

“It’s warmer in the bedroom,” Katya said simply, almost with the air of self reprimanding. “You should just sleep in there.”

Trixie raised her eyebrows, a hint of teasing to her posture. 

“Oh, should I now?” She asked with a laugh. 

“Oh fuck off, I may be a dyke but I’m not trying to sleep with you,” Katya fired back. “The apocalypse does wonders for killing your sex drive.”

“Fair enough,” Trixie shrugged. “But if we’re gonna share a bed you should know I’m a blanket hog.” 

“Don’t worry,” Katya laughed softly. “I’ll give you a run for your money on that one.”

They shared a bed for the first time that night after the sun set behind the trees, curling up on either side of the double mattress with twice as many blankets stacked on top of them as either one was used to. 

Katya didn’t fall asleep right away, and she could tell that Trixie didn’t either. It wasn’t because they were uncomfortable, per say, but the close intimacy of sharing a space like that with another human being wasn’t exactly something either one had experienced in quite some time.

Katya pulled the covers up against her chin, feeling a little out of a place, a little like a kid at a sleepover with a new acquaintance whose friendship language she didn’t quite speak yet. 

So she crowded herself over onto the right side of the bed, leaving two thirds of the mattress to her left for Trixie to claim as if Trixie wasn’t doing the same thing on the other side. Wide awake. Both suddenly aware that they weren’t sure whether sharing the night with someone else would make it easier or harder in the long run. 

It was the perfect moment for Katya’s brain to start running wild, wild enough to force her lungs to contract, her lips and tongue to dance, and her breath to push the words out of her mouth. 

“I want to come with you,” she said, voice cracking from disuse as the words dissolved into the darkness. 

“What?” Trixie asked from the opposite side of the bed, startled by the sudden dive back into conversation. 

“When you leave,” Katya said with a forced confidence. She needed to say it, and she was going to make herself follow through because she had spent days picturing what her father would say if she ignored an opportunity like the one in front of her, an opportunity for a new life. 

_ Yekaterina, you are allowed to hurt and ache but you are not allowed to give up. Understand? _

“You want to go to DC?” Trixie clarified. 

“Yes.”

“It’s gonna be a long walk--”

“I know,” Katya nodded. 

“And I don’t know for sure what we’ll find--”

“Can’t be worse than this.”

Trixie snorted. 

“Might be dangerous,” she shrugged. 

“We gotta go out trying, right?” Katya tossed a sentiment that Trixie had been expressing since the moment she walked through the front door right back at her. 

Trixie let out a deep breath.

“Damn right.”

 

_ Trixie had never been the kind of kid to get in any sort of trouble. _

_ She was a good student, the kind of sister and daughter that made the family look good so long as she didn’t try to discuss politics with any of her more conservative aunts and uncles. She had never been given detention and never so much as received a warning from a teacher. _

_ None of this, however, kept her from learning a thing or two about surviving. Not when she was dirt poor, all of her friends were dirt poor, and sometimes the adults in her life took steps outside of what was necessarily  _ legal  _ to get by. _

_ Amelia was still surprised when she found out her little sister knew how to hotwire a car.  _

_ “Who  _ are _ you?” She asked, standing outside the open driver’s side door and watching Trixie work under the dashboard.  _

_ Amelia’s car was abandoned on a country road somewhere a mile or so back, out of gas with no hope of a refill, and their bags lied in the dirt by her feet.  _

_ “I’m an engineer, Ames,” Trixie said simply, screwdriver between her teeth.  _

_ “Oh, so they’re teaching illegal activities in master’s programs now?” Amy crossed her arms over her chest matter of factly.  _

_ “Oh my god—” _

_ “Or does it have more to do with all that time you spent with--” _

_ “Aliens are invading, Amelia!” Trixie cut her off with an exasperated hiss of an exclamation. “And I am  _ trying  _ to get us out of here alive, so maybe now isn’t the time to talk about what I may or may not have learned from Uncle Shawn.” _

_ “Where are we even going to go in this?” Amelia asked, and Trixie could tell she wasn’t actually angry, was just expressing her fear in the only way she knew how.  _

_ It had always been Amelia’s M.O. to get mad about anything other than the thing she was actually upset about as a means of distracting from how hurt she was. She had done it when their uncle had gotten arrested, she had done it when she hadn’t gotten into her top college, and she was doing it then, too shortly after Trixie had to drag her away from her husband’s lifeless body. _

_ “I don’t know,” Trixie sighed. “I don’t have a fucking clue, but shouldn’t we be at least trying to do  _ something _ right now?” _

_ Amelia leaned heavily against the car with a huff, tears clearly in her eyes as she tried to stay strong for her baby sister.  _

_ Trixie looked up at her, heart sinking with the knowledge that everything they knew was falling to pieces right before their eyes but zero knowledge as to how to handle it.  _

_ “This is a pit if I ever saw one, huh?” Trixie muttered, turning back to her work as her sister let out a snort of a bitter laugh.  _

_ “Yeah, universe,” she looked up to the sky. “Where’s our fuckin’ peach? Don’t you owe us one?” _

_ Trixie stuck a screwdriver in the key ignition and twisted.  _

_ The car revved to life. _

 

Katya knew that the universe didn’t really owe her much of anything, but sitting across from Trixie at a kitchen table, eating beans out of cans by candlelight felt a lot like karma finally saying  _ I guess you’ve had enough pain, here’s a friend. _

They weren’t speaking as they sat there, sharing a meal nevertheless as a watered down version of companionship, a diluted version of socialization. 

At least for a moment. 

“My sister and I used to do this thing,” Trixie blurted out through a mouthful of food, breaking the near silence in what Katya was beginning to understand as some sort of coping. Where Katya had learned to find comfort in quiet, Trixie seemed to be relishing in the fact that she didn’t have to anymore. “We’d go over the peach and pit of our lives since the last time we’d spoken.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Katya said simply, because she truly didn’t. 

“Like, absolute best and absolute worst,” Trixie explained with a shrug. “Gives a good idea of what you’ve been up to. Might be a good way to make this whole thing less… I don’t know. Less weird.”

Trixie was right about one thing. It  _ was _ weird.

They had been sharing a space for almost a week, living intimately close to one another but only speaking about things that didn't matter, rarely about themselves, rarely about how they’d ended up there, rarely about what came next. 

“You wanna know the worst part of the world ending?” Katya asked with skeptical eyebrows and an amusement to her tone. “I think it’s right there in the lead, Doctor Jo.” 

“Oh fuck off,” Trixie brushed her off but Katya could see her blushing, could tell she was embarrassed. “It was a stupid idea. Whatever.”

“No, no, okay, I’ll try,” Katya cut in hurriedly, suddenly aware that she no longer knew the limits of teasing in any social interaction. 

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to, it’s a good idea,” Katya cut her off before she could even suggest that the idea was bad again. In all truthfulness, Katya thought it was almost  _ sweet _ , was the softest she had seen Trixie, reminded her of her own traditions with a family whose image was fading more in her memory every day. “Pit first?”

Trixie smiled softly at her. “Pit always first.”

Katya nodded, bit at her bottom lip and pulled a piece of dry skin in between her teeth, a bad habit but a habit nonetheless. 

“I was supposed to be with my family,” she eventually admitted quietly, gaze dropping to the can in front of her, to the way her hands wrapped around it. “The day They showed up. I extended a work trip an extra day, but I was supposed to be home helping my parents set up a party for their fiftieth wedding anniversary.”

“Where are you from?” Trixie asked, a kindness in her voice that made Katya really see the teacher in her for the first time. 

“Boston,” Katya said. “The whole city was obliterated almost immediately.”

Trixie took in a sharp breath before Katya even finished speaking. Boston had been the first place to burst into flames on that day, back when people still had access to news coverage of what was going on. Of course she knew about Boston. 

“Do you ever think,” Trixie said hesitantly. “If you hadn’t been working…”

“I think about it all the time,” Katya laughed bitterly. “And at least I would’ve been able to say a proper goodbye. Be there with them when it happened. Instead I got to watch three strangers get blown up and get lost in the woods for three days before I found this place.” 

“I’m sorry,” Trixie said, both of their voices getting progressively quieter, as if they were middle school kids whispering secrets back and forth at a sleepover, as if their parents would wake up and reprimand them at any moment. 

“Not your fault,” Katya finally looked up and met her eyes, holding her gaze for a serious moment. “Your turn.”

Trixie took in a deep breath, setting her spoon aside and leaning her forearms on the table as she let it out slowly. Buying time. Formulating her sentences. 

“I watched my brother-in-law die, and then later my sister,” she said all in one breath without looking up at Katya. “The three of us had protested the experimentation three days before the first attacks. Still had picket signs in the living room when it happened.”

Katya’s breath stilled in her lungs. 

“Shit,” she whispered, because speaking at full volume felt somehow disrespectful to the dead, to the current conversation, to Trixie. 

But Trixie just shrugged, letting a heavy, lengthy beat hang over them in silence for a moment. Katya watched as Trixie picked at the skin around her nails across the table.

It wasn’t something that you just left behind, watching someone die, and Katya understood that as well as the next apocalypse survivor. She wondered if Trixie still thought about it every day, still saw it replay on a loop every night when she tried to sleep, still considered any sidestep or decision that could have made it play out differently.

Katya wondered how similar she and Trixie really were. 

“I can tell you the peach now if you want,” Trixie eventually spoke up. 

“Go for it,” Katya looked up to see a mischievous glint in Trixie’s eyes.

“I don’t have to pay off my fucking student loans now,” Trixie deadpanned. 

Katya let herself laugh as loud as she could at that. It was the only way she knew how to drown out the melancholy and the fear, shake off the discomfort and let herself really accept a new world. One with people in it, with Trixie, with melting snow and sunshine, with just enough canned food to not go hungry. With hope amongst all the loss. 

“You’re a little fucked up in the head, aren’t you?” Katya asked Trixie, who was laughing just as uncontrollably, a weird form of catharsis because they’d watched people die and didn’t think it was possible to find anything funny ever again, yet there they were. 

Trixie cocked her head to the side, a slight smirk playing at the corners of her lips. 

“Who isn’t these days?”

 

_ Trixie really couldn’t be sure where it had all gone wrong.  _

_ Well, that’s not entirely true. Trixie knew the exact moment that everything had gone wrong, had watched it on her television and out the front window of her sister’s home. She remembered every moment leading up to when it all went wrong, knew every political stance, fact, and figure of the ordeal and still she hadn’t seen it coming.  _

_ “Hey, don’t fall asleep,” Trixie snapped in front of her sister’s face, barely able to get sound out from between the pads of her fingertips with the intense shaking of her hands.  _

_ Trixie’s gaze bounced between the road in front of her, the speedometer climbing as high as the stolen car’s engine could take it, and the deep red blooming out across Amelia’s left shoulder.  _

_ “M’not,” Amelia mumbled, head against the window and right hand slipping down from where it had been holding her wound-- hastily stitched with purple thread from a travel-sized sewing kit but bleeding heavily nonetheless.  _

_ “Keep pressure on it,” Trixie grabbed Amelia’s hand and lifted it back up towards the wound. “Just keep pressure until we can get you help, okay?” _

_ “Trixie,” Amelia turned her head to look at her sister, cheek against the headrest and slouching low in her seat. “Breathe, please.” _

_ “I’m not the one that needs to focus on breathing right now,” Trixie fired back, more fear than anything in her voice. “Keep pressure,” she grabbed Amelia’s hand and pressed it against the wound once more.  _

_ It had happened too quickly to stop. Trixie knew that They had hit Amelia before Trixie had even realized their presence on the side of the road, and no matter how quickly Trixie had gotten the both of them back in the car, away from a tree full of apples to be picked, she couldn’t have stopped the bullet that was now embedded in Amelia’s shoulder.  _

_ But it had been her idea to stop and pick the apples. It had been her idea to get out of the car when they knew they were still too close to the city, still too vulnerable to be reckless.  _

_ Trixie knew.  _

_ “Trixie, please listen to me,” Amelia said, voice soft and losing strength by the minute.  _

_ “There’s another city coming up soon and we’ll be able to find a drug store or a clinic or something and get you properly disinfected and stitched up--” _

_ “Hey--” _

_ “We’re gonna find help, just don’t agitate it too much and--” _

_ “Trixie, we’re not gonna find help!” Amelia exclaimed, voice cracking as she tried to stay strong.  _

_ Trixie took in a sharp breath and shook her head.  _

_ “Don’t say that,” she breathed.  _

_ “You’re gonna be okay,” Amelia continued, but Trixie just kept shaking her head and staring at the long road in front of her. “You are so smart, and you’re gonna find a way out of this.” _

_ “Stop saying goodbye,” Trixie reprimanded, although not so fiercely as tears stung in her eyes. “You’re supposed to keep fighting. Just keep fucking fighting.” _

_ “Joanne Beatrice Mattel, stop being stubborn,” Amelia said with a quiet laugh, reaching out and taking one of Trixie’s hands in both of her own, holding on tight. And then, in a simple breath of a request: “Pull over.” _

_ “No,” Trixie said combatively.  _

_ “Pull the car over,” Amelia said once more. “I wanna look at your face.”  _

_ Trixie looked at her then, still maintaining her same leaden foot on the gas pedal. Her bottom lip trembled almost comically as she tried not to sob at the sight of her big sister, dying right in front of her eyes.  _

_ “Amy, you’re bleeding so much,” she croaked.  _

_ “Will you promise me something?” Amelia asked, ignoring Trixie’s statement. They both knew what was happening, so why waste the time it would take to acknowledge it? _

_ “Don’t say goodbye.” _

_ “You have such a big heart, Trix,” Amelia pushed on. “Don’t let this make you cruel. Please.” _

_ “Amy--” _

_ Trixie was cut off by an intense coughing fit that had Amelia letting go of Trixie’s hand to cover her mouth, tears slipping down her cheeks with the force of it.  _

_ When she pulled her hand away, there was a small smattering, a small pool of blood in the crater of her palm and Trixie’s heart started beating in double time.  _

_ “Fuck, fuck, fuck--” _

_ “I love you so much, Trix,” Amelia cut off her panic, leaning heavily into her seat, struggling to keep her eyes open. “So fucking much, you have no idea.” _

_ “I love you, Amy-- Please just,” Trixie floundered, hand squeezing at Amelia’s thigh. “Keep fighting-- You always say keep fighting…” she trailed off as Amelia let out a heavy sigh, head nodding so her chin rested against her chest.  _

_ Eyes glassy.  _

_ Breath still.  _

_ Hands limp.  _

_ Tears began to blur Trixie’s vision, foot still heavy on the gas and hand gripping her sister with enough force that it  _ should _ have shocked her heart back to life, should have pushed air into her lungs, should have put the life back in her eyes.  _

_ “No,” Trixie shook her head. “You’re not allowed to do that-- You’re not-- Don’t fuckin’ leave me,” she cried, voice growing louder and more desperate with each syllable that slipped off of her tongue.  _

_ She slowed down and pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned fully to face her sister so she could grab onto her with both hands.  _

_ “Amy!” she sobbed, hysterical in the most primal sense of the word. “Amy-- Wake up-- Please-- You can’t die-- You can’t-- You…” her pleas collapsed into incoherent wails of pure and untainted pain.  _

_ The sun was setting along the horizon, a bright and beautiful orange that created a halo around her sister’s head.  _

_ In a few minutes the sun would be down and the car’s automatic headlights would flicker on.  _

_ In a few hours Trixie’s tears would quiet but her heart would still feel raw and torn and mangled inside her chest.  _

_ The next morning, Trixie would carry her sister out into a nearby field, bury her in a makeshift grave, and adorn it with a stack of purple wildflowers.  _

_ But for a moment, in that moment, she just clung to Amy with all the strength left in her body.  _

_ In that moment, Trixie just cried.  _

 

The snow held its ground in their path for a solid two weeks-- a period of time they only knew because Trixie had asked Peppermint for the date on one of their check-ins (March 2, 2021) and sketched in a calendar to hang on the wall. 

They crossed off each day as the sun went down and started to mark predictions for when they might be able to leave based on the speed at which the ice was melting, icicles dripping in the sun as it found its way out from behind clouds to land softly on their porch. 

The record player spun for most hours of the day and they took turns boiling and bottling as much water as they could before the snow completely melted. They got comfortable in each other’s presence, passing through the other’s space with ease and settling into a fluent dance of survival in their cabin on a mountain. 

It was natural in a way neither had truly expected and Katya found herself sharing. 

She found herself revealing things to Trixie that at times felt frivolous, pointless-- she hated mustard and used to wear a very specific shade of red lipstick from Mac-- and at other times felt too personal-- what it had been like to meet three people and watch them die in the same day, how the last conversation she’d had with her father had been a lie about being home on time.

In return, Trixie let loose about her sister the activist and her uncle the criminal who stole cars and sold their parts, a man who had been in prison for most of her childhood. She told Katya what it had been like to teach herself guitar and what the scene of her sister’s death looked like in her nightmares each time she tried to go to sleep. 

Katya stopped shying away from Trixie’s sleeping form in bed at night and Trixie stopped acting like she understood the After any better than Katya did. They were both in the same boat: a little bit lost and a lot hopeful, a lot scared, a lot grateful to not be alone. At least for the moment. At least for as long as they could trust one another. 

As the snow began to melt more quickly, they started setting things aside for the journey. Katya found an extra backpack in the basement and filled it with as many cans of food and bottles of water as she could while Trixie started finding ways to tie rolled-up blankets to her own pack. 

Trixie taught Katya how to sew and they patched up the worn out clothes they’d both been wearing for far too long with the knowledge they were only going to get torn the moment they began hiking. 

Katya studied a map and found what she hoped to be the fastest, safest route towards their destination. 

At some point however, about two and a half weeks into their companionship, it began to feel like they were completely and fully prepared for a journey that would never come. 

It wasn’t until they stopped expecting their situation to change that it did. 

“Katya!” Trixie’s voice echoed out across the small space of the house, startling Katya out of a deep slumber with her face pressed up against a pillow and her legs sprawled out across an empty bed. 

“Hmm?” Katya mumbled, still half asleep as she pushed herself up into a sitting position, just in time to see Trixie barreling into the room. Her face was was lit up, eyes wide and sparkling in the morning light. 

“Get out of bed, come on,” she urged hurriedly, a small smile tugging at her lips. 

“Okay, gimme a sec,” Katya yawned and stretched, slowly making her way to the edge of the bed. 

“No,  _ hurry,” _ Trixie groaned, grabbing Katya by the hand and practically dragging her out the door, through the living room, and towards the front porch. 

Trixie opened the door and pulled Katya to stand beside her.

“Jesus, what could possibly be so goddamn important--”

“Grass,” Trixie said simply, pointing to the small yard between them and the road. 

She didn’t let go of Katya’s hand. 

Katya’s jaw dropped. “You can see the road,” she breathed, suddenly awake. 

“No clouds,” Trixie continued, a monosyllabic form of shock seeming to overcome her speech for a moment as she took in the scenery before them. 

Katya let out a startled laugh and squeezed Trixie’s hand as they both looked to the clear, blue sky. It was still cold, of course it was, but there wasn’t any sign of weather to get in their way. 

“We should call Peppermint,” Trixie said as she looked to Katya, letting their eyes meet for the first time, letting themselves share in whatever sort of nervous excitement had overcome their little patch of safe haven. 

“Yeah,” Katya nodded enthusiastically and looked back out to spot a small yellow dandelion poking out between two rocks at the bottom of the porch steps. “Trixie, what does this mean?” she asked, not because she didn’t know, but because she wanted to hear it, wanted Trixie to make it real. 

“I think it means it’s time to leave,” Trixie said, a monumental heaviness to her voice but a lightness in her eyes. “It’s time to go to DC.”

Katya had been considering this moment for weeks and Trixie even longer, so there was a certain level of disbelief in both of their hearts as they realized what was finally right ahead of them, just one step closer to being within arm’s reach. 

Katya took a deep breath of crisp, pine-scented air and let it out slowly.

“Okay,” she nodded, letting herself come to terms with it all. “Let’s get ready.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading <3
> 
> if you wanna leave a comment or come say hi on tumblr @ourforgottenboleros i always appreciate that!


	4. a journey started

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s not fair,” Trixie’s voice cracked, barely a whisper as she spoke to the ground in front of her. 
> 
> “You’re right,” Katya said softly, lifting a hand as if to rest it on Trixie’s shoulder but pulling it back with uncertainty before she ever made contact. 
> 
> Katya wasn’t sure how to comfort her in a moment like this, when all of her anger was justified, when they were both eternally walking a tightrope of suicidal ideation because how was any of this worth it? What was the point in continuing to try when the odds were so stacked against them?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for sticking around for this dumb story <3

 

_ “Yaya?” _

_ “Yes, Grandma?” Katya called over her shoulder without slowing the burning pace of her pumping legs, sending her higher and higher on the rickety swingset in her grandmother’s backyard.  _

_ She was convinced if she practiced enough, she would find a way to flip backwards over the pole, and boy, would the entire third grade get a kick out of that.  _

_ “Come back inside,” her grandmother insisted, heavy Russian accent in full play. The kids at school always thought it was intimidating. Katya thought it was beautiful. “It is freezing and I need your help with the cookies.”  _

_ “Coming!” she called back, sticking out her feet and letting the heels of her sneakers drag through the dirt, pulling at her achilles tendon and slowing her bit by bit until she was swinging low enough to hop off and stumble back inside through the back door.  _

_ Katya and her parents had moved out of her grandmother’s house a few years prior at that point, but the small collection of rooms wrapped up in blue shutters and patterned rugs would always feel like home to the young girl.  _

_ The warmth of the kitchen enveloped Katya the moment she stumbled in, letting her coat fall to the floor behind her and stepping up onto a small stool next to her grandmother at the counter.  _

_ “Yekaterina. Coat,” her father said from the kitchen table, not even looking up from his newspaper with reading glasses perched at the stable tip of his nose. Every inch of that man was stable.  _

_ “Dad,” Katya whined, tiny hand already gripping a big wooden spoon in an attempt to mix the ingredients that would become her grandmother’s famous cookie dough recipe.  _

_ He just pointed to the coat on the ground without looking up, smirking slightly as Katya let out an exasperated huff and shuffled across the house to hang her coat up properly on the hook by the front door.  _

_ Katya’s mother had been called into work, because Russian Christmas wasn’t exactly a well-known holiday in Boston and someone had to deliver the babies being born. Her mother the doctor, bringing life into the world while Katya mixed together what she believed would become the greatest batch of cookies ever baked.  _

_ She concentrated hard on the task at hand, blowing her bangs out of her eyes periodically but keeping the tip of her tongue secured between her teeth the rest of the time.  _

_ “How did the auditions go?” Nadia eventually asked as she watched Katya, immediately gaining a look from Katya’s father.  _

_ “Mom,” he began, a warning. His eyes even flicked up from the article he was reading for a moment, a sign that he was really, truly, genuinely serious.  _

_ “ _ _ Pust' devushka govorit sama za sebya,” Nadia brushed him off. “I want to hear it from her.”  _

_ Katya had begun to mix harder, feeling her cheeks burn almost as much as her tired arms. _

_ “Katya?” Nadia insisted. _

_ “ _ _ Ne zastavlyayte yeye delat' eto,” he sighed, but his mother wasn’t letting up.  _

_ The room was quiet, a silent expectation radiating off of the adults in the room as all of their attention was focused on the little girl with the blunt bangs and rapid stirring technique.  _

_ Katya took a deep breath and let the spoon fall into the bowl as she sighed.  _

_ “I didn’t make the team,” she breathed.  _

_ Katya refused to look up from the countertop in front of her, willing embarrassment out of her heart and a tightness out of her chest.  _

_ She never should have tried out for that stupid gymnastics team to begin with. She should have stayed home, would have rather been comfortable in laziness than disappointed in hopefulness.  _

_ “Yaya, look at me,” Nadia dragged Katya to sit down at the kitchen table and dropped to her knees in front of her granddaughter. Her feet swung anxiously off the ground in her seat as she played with the hem of her too-big sweater.  _

_ “I’m sorry,” Katya said softly. “I tried my best.” _

_ “Yes, you did,” Nadia nodded. “And for that reason you should not be sorry.” _

_ Katya looked up and met her grandmother’s soft eyes at that. The woman was smiling, didn’t look disappointed or embarrassed in the slightest.  _

_ “But I didn’t—” _

_ “I do not care,” she cut Katya off with a shake of her head. “You put hard work into this. You did not win, but you fought, and that is what matters. You are a fighter, Katya.” _

_ “Fighters win,” Katya said simply with a small shake of her head in disagreement.  _

_ “Fighters  _ fight,” _ Nadia fired right back. “Do you want to be on that team?” _

_ Katya nodded, tears pricking at the backs of her eyes.  _

_ “Then you work hard,” Nadia gripped Katya’s hands in her own. “You try again and you fight for it.” _

_ “But what if I’m just bad?” Katya asked, eyes big and brow furrowed enough that her elastic, young skin looked like she’d already lived lifetimes. A look inside her frantic brain might suggest just the same.  _

_ “You are allowed to be bad at things,” Nadia replied with confidence. “But you are not allowed to give up on them.”  _

 

Part of Katya was surprised to actually be going through with it. That first step.

The first step that Katya took into the road, the first step she took decisively  _ away _ from the cabin that had become her home, felt heavy in her boots and seemed to send out shockwaves of monumental change in all directions. 

The first step was huge and loud and filled her bones with the type of excitement she hadn’t experienced for many years, the type of excitement that came with knowing something good was waiting for you at the other end of the tunnel. 

The first step was confident. 

The second step was fearful. 

“Are you sure we have everything?” Katya asked, two full steps down the road with Trixie a handful of feet ahead of her. “We aren’t forgetting anything?”

“We’ve checked a dozen times, Katya,” Trixie turned over her shoulder to look at Katya, exasperated. 

“I know, I know, I just…” Katya trailed off, looking back at the front door where they had painted  _ RADIO IN BASEMENT _ in bright red spray paint as some sort of beacon to future travellers in need of a safe haven, a life line. 

She hadn’t looked at the cabin from the outside very much during her time there, hadn’t even ventured farther than ten feet away in the year and a half she’d taken up residence. It looked smaller than she remembered it looking, a little more beaten up, the wood panelling even appeared  _ tired _ somehow. 

But then again, so did she. 

“Are you…” Trixie began hesitantly. “Are you rethinking this?”

Katya’s gaze shot back to her abruptly, the way two of them were standing in the middle of the road suddenly feeling more stagnant than monumental. 

“What? No,” Katya shook her head frantically. “No, I’m-- It’s just,” she took a deep breath and let it out in a shaky gust, clouding up the frigid air in front of her face momentarily. “Trixie, I’m scared,” she finally said, all in one breath and quieter than before, more private. 

Trixie’s face softened, not in pity, but in understanding. The soft smile that spread across her face was one of almost gratitude, if Katya had to put a word to it. 

“Me too,” she said simply. “Scared outta my fucking mind.” 

Katya huffed out a surprised laugh, bubbling with nervous energy that she didn’t have full control over. 

“Yeah?” She questioned. Trixie just snorted.

“With you as my co-navigator? Of course I am,” she teased, but there was no malice in it. Katya was briefly overtaken with the idea of being Trixie’s co- _ anything _ . It made the cold air still in her lungs for a moment, a beat of a second longer in between puffs of condensed air freezing in front of her face. 

“Are you ready?” Trixie asked, flipping back into serious conversation with her fingers wrapped tightly around the straps of her backpack. 

Katya looked over her shoulder one last time, catalogued the picture of it in the assumption that she would have the chance to tell someone,  _ anyone _ about it eventually, and then she nodded and took three long strides to catch up to Trixie. 

“Come on, slowpoke,” she said with a smirk as she overtook Trixie’s position on the path. “I might just leave you behind.” 

 

_ Katya felt left behind.  _

_ The sun was bright and the sky was a bluer blue than she had ever seen it, the grass a greener green. It wasn’t fair, the world had no right to look quite so joyful when all the joy had been sucked out of Katya’s life.  _

_ She would have rathered it be stormy. It was supposed to rain at funerals, or at least, that’s what the movies had always taught her. But it was sunny and Katya had no rain on which to blame her tear-stained cheeks, no black umbrella to hide under and avoid the pitiful looks of distant relatives.  _

_ Katya’s grandmother was dead and she thought she deserved a little bit of sorrow from planet Earth. No such luck.  _

_ Katya, in all her nineteen-year-old glory, didn’t speak to anyone for the entire day. Stayed silent through her father’s questions and stared blankly on when her mother tried to hug her.  _

_ They held a small reception back at the house, but even then Katya chose to ignore every single person and every single one of their stilted condolences. They had no right to feel sorry for her. They hadn’t know Nadia Zamolodchikova as she had. _

_ So, Katya gathered a heaping plate of food, a bottle of white wine, and locked herself in her grandmother’s bedroom.  _

_ The comforter was a patchwork of various other blankets that Nadia had pieced together with her own two hands. Not a single one of the patterns matched the others, ranging from plain stripes and plaid to the loud colors of something more modern. Katya sat down in the center of it, legs criss-crossed and paper plate of hor-devours held tense hands.  _

_ She missed her grandmother’s house, the one she had lived in as a child, the one Nadia had lived in alone until she had gotten too sick to care for herself. She missed the tiny backyard and the swingset that rusted more and more each winter. She missed the smell of cookies in the kitchen and how frustrated she had been every time Nadia made her do the dishes after dinner.  _

_ She missed the love that filled those walls, the support and endless advice that blew through the vents.  _

_ She missed her grandma. And so she cried.  _

_ “Oh, sweetheart.”  _

_ Katya swiped frantically at her tears as her mother snuck into the room, quietly shutting the door behind her.  _

_ “I’m fine,” Katya mumbled, sliding the bottle of wine under a pillow behind her as if her mom hadn’t already seen it and chosen to ignore it. Just for one day.  _

_ “I know,” Lydia responded, but perched herself on the edge of the mattress with an arm wrapped around Katya’s shoulders nonetheless. Even  _ fine _ people needed a bit of comfort now and again, after all.  _

_ Katya placed her plate of untouched food on the mattress in front of her, freeing up her arms to wrap them tight around her mom.  _

_ “I miss her,” Katya said softly against the black sweater she had buried her face in. _

_ “My mother died before you were born,” Lydia spoke softly. “I was absolutely devastated. I was so excited for her to meet you but we lost her far too soon.” _

_ “I’m sorry.” _

_ “It’s okay, sweetheart,” Lydia squeezed her tighter. “I just want to tell you what your grandma said to me at the funeral.” _

_ Katya pulled just far enough away to look her mother in the eye, to truly take in whatever new story she would get to learn about her grandmother.  _

_ “She said,” Lydia continued. “That I was allowed to miss her for ten minutes every day. Just ten minutes to remember her and be sad that I’d lost her.” _

_ Katya listened intently, nodding along.  _

_ “But she said that the rest of the time,” Lydia swiped a thumb under Katya’s eye, spreading tears across her cheekbone. “The rest of the time I had to keep moving forward. We lose people too often in life to let it stop us from living. You have too much left to do, Yaya, and we both know she would be devastated to see you stop fighting.” _

 

“Okay, keep going,” Trixie said, cutting off whatever rambling train of thought Katya had fallen into with a clap of her gloved hands. 

“Yes! Right, I spy,” Katya said, walking side-by-side with Trixie down a path narrow enough to have them almost bumping shoulders every other step. “With my little eye, something... brown.”

Trixie turned her head and raised her eyebrows at Katya. They were on a forest trail following the biggest snow storm of the year. Everything was fucking brown. 

“What?” Katya shrugged mock-innocently. “You think I’m gonna make it easy for you?”

Trixie snorted. “Fine,” she rolled her eyes. “Is it that tree?”

Katya looked to the sapling Trixie’s finger was pointed towards and shook her head. 

“Nope,” she responded with a grin. “Try again.” 

“Okay, let’s see,” Trixie tapped her previously extended finger against her chin contemplatively. “Is it… Hmm…  _ That _ tree?”

“No again!” Katya laughed at her own game, enjoying her own sense of humor amongst the stillness of the forest. 

Trixie rolled her eyes. 

“Alright, what about  _ that--” _

“It’s not a tree!” Katya cut her off before she could continue on what might have easily become a never ending tour of that particular forest’s foliage. 

“I thought you weren’t gonna make it easy for me?” Trixie raised her eyebrows at Katya, clearly pleased with herself. 

Katya couldn’t help but smile at that, at the way Trixie had seemingly eternal patience when it came to Katya’s shenanigans. 

“Just try again, you specific bitch,” Katya laughed with a nudge to Trixie’s shoulder. 

Katya was a linguist, fluent in three languages and studying new ones all the time when she had had the access

Katya understood the roots and grammar, the way words of different tongues were tied together to form coherent thoughts better than most, but interacting with Trixie felt like a new alphabet altogether: one that they were making up as they went along, one that was only theirs. 

It bounced between fear and humor, empathy and teasing with a rapid rhythm that sounded harsh but  _ felt _ like music. Trixie was learning how to spot the tension in Katya’s shoulders when she got too caught up in reality and Katya was slowly discovering that nothing brightened Trixie’s mood like Katya’s loudest, most played-out cackle of a laugh at even the stupidest of jokes. 

The world had gone silent around them, everything and everyone they had ever known had simply ended, but there they were, starting anew. 

As the end of their first day of walking began to come to an end, they had to start thinking about where they would camp out for the night. The hope had been that they could find some sort of shelter: an alcove or ditch or mystical hollowed-out tree that would keep them out of the wind and weather during the hours they were forced to stop due to lack of light. 

What they ultimately found made them both briefly consider the possibility of real life guardian angels, dykes with wings trying to keep the lesbian population on Earth alive for just a little bit longer. 

“Now  _ that’s _ what I call luck,” Katya said as they rounded a bend in their path and a small, dilapidated hunting shed was revealed from behind a handful of trees. 

She started walking towards it confidently, only to be stopped by Trixie’s tight grip around her forearm that had her jolting a step backwards. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Katya asked as Trixie pulled the two of them behind a tree. 

“What’s wrong with  _ you?” _ Trixie fired right back in a hissing whisper. “You’re just gonna assume it’s empty?”

“You think someone’s  _ living _ in there?” Katya questioned with raised brows as Trixie rolled her eyes, hand still firmly gripping Katya’s arm. 

“If you wanna head in and potentially walk straight into some maniac’s knife be my guest,” she deadpanned, letting go to reach up under her coat towards where the waistband of her pants met her lower back. “I’m gonna make sure it’s clear first.”

Katya’s eyes widened as soon as she saw what exactly Trixie was going to clear the area with. 

“You have a  _ gun?” _ she said in an accusatory hiss. “You’ve had a fucking  _ gun _ this whole time?” 

“So have  _ you,” _ Trixie hissed back, flicking the safety on her handgun. 

“Yeah, but  _ you _ lied!” Katya exclaimed in an outburst that was a little louder than a whisper. 

“Shut  _ up,” _ Trixie groaned. “Did you really think I was gonna spend the night in a stranger’s cabin in the literal woods without something to protect myself?”

Katya opened her mouth as if to respond but ultimately shut it with a huff and an exasperated shake of her head. It made sense that Trixie had a gun, had something more than a steak knife to protect herself, and maybe Katya had actually been the naive, gullible one all along. 

She crossed her arms for a moment as she watched Trixie creep towards the shed before unstrapping her own shotgun from her body and following closely behind her. 

If either one of them had really been using their heads at all, they would have known that anyone hiding in that shed would have been alerted to their presence the moment they arrived, probably would have been amused by the conversation they were having just a few yards away.

Trixie held her gun aloft like someone who had never actually had to use it, but had watched her fair share of crime procedurals. The two of them would have looked comical had their adrenaline not been pumping at even the mere suggestion that they were walking straight into a fight. 

Katya nearly jumped out of her skin when Trixie threw open the door and pointed her gun frantically around the small shed, but followed her inside just seconds later nonetheless. 

It was empty. 

“Alright there, Mulder,” Katya snorted as she lowered her gun. “Convinced we’re alone yet?”

Trixie flipped the safety back on with a roll of her eyes and tucked the gun back into her belt. 

“An X-Files reference? Really?” Trixie teased, letting out a laugh as a sort of release for the nervous energy they’d built up. “A little on the nose, don’t you think?” 

“I know we haven’t known each other all that long,” Katya responded as she dropped her backpack unceremoniously at her feet. “But I’m sorry if I ever gave you the impression that I understand subtlety.”

Trixie’s eyes shot up, a disbelieving grin gracing her face for a beat before she burst out laughing, bringing Katya right along with her for the histerical ride of a lifetime fueled by inexplicable survival and a tad more luck than either of them deserved. 

The shed itself shouldn’t have still been standing and in all likelihood, might just have ended up collapsing on them in their sleep. The wood was rotting in some places and there were cracks in the walls where cold seeped through, but it kept the brunt of the wind off their skin and was significantly warmer than it was outside, where the sun was swiftly setting below the horizon. 

And so they tried to find a way to get comfortable for the night. 

“You ever been camping before?” Katya asked as she laid out the blankets to form a sorry excuse for a bed they could share. 

“My mom took my sister and I once,” Trixie nodded, propping a dozen or so rocks up in front of the door. They wouldn’t keep it shut for long if someone tried to get in, but they  _ would _ give the two women a head start to wake up before they were ambushed. “It was terrible, I was covered in mosquito bites for weeks,” she laughed softly at the memory.

Katya couldn’t help but smile at her from across the small space in a way that she would never have admitted was longingly (but was almost certainly longingly). 

“I miss them,” Trixie said, the statement more melancholy than tragic as it had been in past conversations. 

Katya’s heart felt a little bit like mush when she heard the love in Trixie’s voice for the people she had lost. Of course she understood the sentiment of it, she just sometimes forgot the way it looked on other people. But Trixie was painfully honest with a face so expressive that Katya hadn’t even needed a dictionary to learn how to read it. 

“When my grandma died, my mom gave me some good advice,” Katya said, stalling the task at hand to sit back on her heels and pull at the frayed edges of the blankets in between her fingers. Trixie turned to look at her expectantly. “You’re allowed to miss them for ten minutes every day. Like, full-blown sadness, miss the absolute hell out of them, feel sorry for yourself or guilty for surviving or any of it-- but only for ten minutes. And then,” she shrugged. “Then you have to keep moving forward despite it all.” 

The air stalled between them, and if Katya had been able to meet Trixie’s eyes she just might have seen the beginnings of tears lying in wait. The kind of tears that flowed out of competing happiness and sadness, the kind of tears that flowed because of a too-full heart. 

“She sounds like a wonderful woman,” Trixie said quietly and Katya smiled at the memory of Lydia, the woman with blonde hair down to her hips that she tied up into a perfect ballet bun every morning before she left for work. 

“She was a doctor too y’know, Jo,” Katya grinned. And then quieter, more to herself than anything: “She would’ve loved you.” 

Katya looked down at her hands with a faint smile on her face and in her heart. She hadn’t thought about her grandmother in far too long, but she knew that Nadia would be proud of her. Katya was still fighting, even if she had almost given up, even if she had almost lost sight of the path ahead, even if she had momentarily accepted being bad at life and decided to simply stop trying. 

Nadia would see Katya trying again and she would be proud. Nadia would have loved Trixie too. 

Eventually they made the shed habitable for the night, curled up under shared blankets and inside shared body heat as they scooped dinner out of cans and into hungry mouths. 

There wasn’t any question of lying close to one another as they dozed off in an awkward, if not somehow also completely natural, heap of  _ persons. _

Neither one of them smelled particularly good, but Katya breathed in the warmth of Trixie beside her, wrapped herself around the way it curled through the air, and dreamed of chocolate chip cookies and a rusty swing set. 

 

_ Katya’s car was something of a clunker.  _

_ The battery died every winter and it was old enough to still have manual, wind-by-hand windows, but at twenty years old it had served her well. _

_ It was late fall when she pulled that clunky, old, junk heap of a car into her parents’ driveway, turned the engine off, and sat. Just sat, as if the world stopped turning for her own benefit and she was allowed to take as much time, sitting in that driveway, as she needed.  _

_ Even as she sat parked, her hands gripped the steering wheel in front of her and she let her head fall back and  _ thump _ against the headrest. And again. And once more.  _

_ Katya squeezed her eyes shut and groaned, because even a two hour drive back to the suburbs from her college dorm wasn’t long enough to prepare herself for the conversation that inevitably lied in wait for her on the other side of that front door.  _

_ That is, as soon as she managed to stop sitting. Just sitting.  _

_ She watched the sun set slowly in her rearview mirror for thirty whole minutes before she smacked the steering wheel three definitive times and pushed herself out of the car, across the small, orange leaf-littered walkway, and straight up the front steps.  _

_ “I’m home!” she called out to the house as she let herself in and let the door fall shut behind her.  _

_ “Katya?”  _

_ The sound of her mother’s sneakers as they squeaked across the kitchen tile and into the entryway was familiar and comfortable but, just this once, made Katya steel herself.  _

_ “I didn’t know you were coming home this weekend?” she grinned and reached out to pull her daughter into a tight hug. “Dmitri! Yekaterina is visiting!” she called out over her shoulder, already pulling Katya back into the kitchen and filling up a tea kettle with water from the sink.  _

_ “Mom, I wanted to talk to you about--” _

_ “Katya? What are you doing home?” her father cut her off as he joined them, placing a kiss to the crown of her head before sitting down at the table.  _

_ “I just have something I want to talk to you--” _

_ “Black or green tea, sweetheart?” Lydia asked absentmindedly as she set the kettle on the stove and moved back to the cabinets where Katya knew their stash of tea was stored.   _

_ The casual chatter of it all was setting Katya on edge, hands squeezed into tight fists inside her deep coat pockets.  _

_ “It doesn’t matter,” she shook her head. “I came home to--” _

_ “I’ll just grab your usual,” Lydia smiled at her over her shoulder. Katya’s father was reading the paper at the table, just as clueless.  _

_ “Grab me a mug too, would you?” he asked, forcing a nearly-painful roll of the eyes out of Katya.  _

_ “Can I  _ please--”

_ “Oh!” Lydia exclaimed as if she’d just remembered something. How it was more important than Katya’s own dilemma was beyond her. “Your cousins are coming to visit for Christmas this--” _

_ “I dropped out!” _

_ It burst out of her without waiting for her permission, the words as frustrated with her parents as Katya herself was at that moment. She was breathing heavier than should have been necessary to just be standing (just standing) in the center of that stupid kitchen with its stupid checkered tiles and its-- _

_ “I beg your pardon?” Dmitri set down his paper, a sudden quiet filling a house that was so used to easily excitable inhabitants and boisterous laughter.  _

_ “I’m not going back to school,” she said with faux confidence. It was right decision, she knew that it was. She just had to convince them of that.  _

_ “Yekaterina, I don’t understand,” Lydia moved around the counter to stand closer to Katya, who still refused to, couldn’t, move from her spot.  _

_ “I have decided that college isn’t the right path for me,” Katya said softly with a practiced eloquence. “So I am no longer enrolled.”  _

_ “You’re more than halfway done already,” Dmitri looked at her with confusion. “Why give up now when--” _

_ “I’m not giving up,” she snapped. If anything mattered to her it was that they understood that much.  _

_ “Then what is this?” Lydia asked softly, clear concern painting her body language. “We’re just trying to understand.” _

_ “Eto o babushke?” Dmitri asked and Katya rolled her eyes.  _

_ “This isn’t about Grandma-- This isn’t-- It’s not about anyone but me,” she stuttered. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and this is the right decision. _

_ “If you’re struggling, we can find a way to help,” Lydia said. “A tutor or--” _

_ “I don’t want a tutor--” _

_ “Don’t stop fighting just because it’s hard,” Dmitri pressed. “That’s not like you.” _

_ “This isn’t about it being  _ hard,” _ she insisted, hands sweating inside her coat pockets like waterfalls of boiling anxiety. “I’m not gonna fight for something that’s making me miserable!”  _

_ Katya’s voice cracked and she could feel floods of tears being held behind levies of her own stubbornness. Both of her parents got quiet and just watched their daughter who continued to stand, just stand there, but bursting at the seams.  _

_ “Okay,” her mother eventually breathed. “I trust you.” _

_ “Lydia--” _

_ “This is her choice,” Lydia turned to her husband with raised eyebrows and a newfound sense of calm. “Our daughter is a fighter. Do you really want to be the one she is fighting?”  _

_ Katya let out a tense breath of air that began as a relieved laugh and collapsed into a relieved sob. Lydia acted fast, immediately pulling Katya into her arms in a warm embrace.  _

_ “You’ll come home, yeah?” she said softly into Katya’s hair. “We’ll talk through it and figure out what’s next. College will always be there if you want to go back. You have to find your own path.” _

_ Katya sniffled and finally pulled her hands out of her pockets to hug her mother back.  _

_ “Thank you,” she whispered in a failed attempt to sound more put together than she was.  _

_ “I don’t want you to lose yourself in doing what you think is expected,” her mother said. “I want you to forge your own path.” _

 

It wasn’t until halfway through their third day of walking, with blistered feet and tired lungs, that anything particularly noteworthy stumbled into their path. Well, that is to make the assumption that hiking through the woods parallel to an overgrown highway a year and a half after a violent alien invasion wasn’t noteworthy, but maybe it wasn’t to two women who had settled into the After as some sort of new normal. 

Katya was the first one to see it, and her instinctual reaction was to stop dead in her tracks and grab ahold of Trixie’s hand to make her stop too.

“Oof-- What?” Trixie stumbled over her own feet before turning to Katya questioningly. 

“If we were cautious about the shed, I feel like you’ll wanna be cautious about that too,” she nodded a handful of yards ahead of them and just outside the treeline to where a mud-stained, once-white van sat silently on the side of the road. 

Trixie inhaled sharply through her nose.

“Maybe it’s abandoned,” she said, quieter now. “Whoever drove it here ran out of gas and walked away?”

“Or maybe they just stopped for a quick nap?” Katya suggested. 

“Even if someone is still in there, we can probably convince them to come to DC with us,” Trixie said with a hopeful lilt to her voice. 

“Yeah,” Katya nodded without taking her eyes off the vehicle. Something about the situation felt wrong to her, but she couldn’t put her finger on just what exactly it was. “Maybe.”

“Come on,” Trixie pulled her gun out-- just in case-- and began taking careful steps forwards. “Let’s check it out.”

“Be careful, please,” Katya hissed after her, unslinging her own gun from her shoulder and following close behind.

Fallen branches cracked underneath their feet as they approached and a cold wind traveled across Katya’s chapped lips painfully. 

Her heartbeat was frantic and she felt as though she had tunnel vision as she approached the front seat of the van, unable to see what was waiting for her there until it was the only thing she could see. 

The silhouette of a person had Katya raising her gun.

“Trixie!” she called out, eyes glued to the figure through the cracked glass of the passenger-side window. 

“Fuck,” Trixie mumbled from the rear end of the vehicle at the same moment that Katya fully registered what was in front of her. 

Her heart sank and her gun dropped to her side, unaware of what Trixie was unsettled by as her breathing halted in her throat.

It was a woman, brown hair matted up where she was slumped low in the seat. The driver’s side window was shattered and there was a wound right above her heart-- a distinct bullet-less gunshot that was certainly not the work of any human weaponry. 

“Trixie,” Katya breathed. “Trixie, she’s--” she cut herself off when she turned her head and saw where Trixie was crouched on the ground, a stranger’s feet peeking out from behind the van. 

Suddenly, Katya had a perfect image of what they had stumbled upon. Not danger and not an obstacle, but instead a grave. A big tin grave for two strangers that-- judging by the smell-- had been unceremoniously laid to rest too long ago, only preserved by the intense cold of winter. 

Katya glanced inside the car, noticing no weapons, a frosted-over bottle of water, and a half-tank of gas. 

They had still had a half tank of gas left. 

“Bullshit,” Trixie spat as she stood up, pulling Katya back to the reality of the situation.

Katya watched her silently, numb by more than just the cold as Trixie stormed out into the middle of the road. 

“I fought for you!” Trixie lifted her face to the sky and screamed, voice cracking and tears tumbling down her red cheeks. “I fought for you and all you’ve done is tear-- Is tear-- Tear everything apart!”

“Trixie, get back here!” Katya hissed from the cover of the trees, watching the wide-open sky with hesitance. The quick escalation of the moment had her trying to twist her head all the way back on properly. 

There wasn’t a single cloud hanging above them, just a never-ending expanse of blue atmosphere and sunlight shining down on their shoulders. 

“They’ve left, Katya,” Trixie fired back, arms dancing to the frantic beat of her frustration as she paced the width of the road. “They tore us apart as much as They fucking felt like and then--and then-- just  _ left _ as if They didn’t commit mass genocide!”

“This isn’t safe, Trixie--”

“What’s gonna happen?” she threw her hands up and Katya caught sight of the broken girl behind all the false confidence, the young woman with dreams of changing the world who had been nothing but torn down each and every time she so much as  _ tried. _ “What are They gonna do, huh?”

“We don’t know for sure that They’re  _ gone,” _ Katya insisted, still unable to force herself out past the edge of the trees, adrenaline pumping despite the lack of an immediate threat. 

She couldn’t get the way Ginger’s face had looked checking the road on that first day out of her fucking head. The way that same face had looked with blank eyes, unbreathing. 

“I don’t fucking  _ care, _ Katya,” Trixie said with a broken sob, and then, right back at the sky. “Wanna abduct me?! Go ahead and beam me the fuck up because nothing good is happening to me here!” She punctuated the statement by picking up a softball-sized rock off the side of the road and chucking it with all her force at a nearby tree. 

The weight of it left a scratch in the bark and it fell with a heavy thud into a pile of pine needles. Trixie didn’t seem to notice, didn’t seem to care as she broke all the way down. 

Katya could feel her heart in her throat as she watched Trixie sink to the ground in the middle of the gravel road, knees digging into the rocks beneath them and hands clutching at her own coat as she disintegrated into a puddle of pure humanity. 

Katya felt frozen for a moment, chest tight and eyes wide as she took on the role of observer once more, willfully giving away any sort of agency she had in the events of her life story because she didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. Anything that could actively tear Trixie Mattel-- Doctor Joanne Beatrice Mattel-- limb from limb? Katya didn’t want any part of that. 

“Trixie,” she said in a breath, taking air deep into her lungs and letting it out slowly. 

She looked up to the blue skies they were trapped below, looked over her shoulder at the abandoned van she knew they needed to commandeer, and then she took a step out into the road. 

And then another. And another and another until she was crouching down next to Trixie in the open air. Vulnerable. Exposed. 

She found that the sheer amount of fresh air was suffocating. 

“It’s not fair,” Trixie’s voice cracked, barely a whisper as she spoke to the ground in front of her. 

“You’re right,” Katya said softly, lifting a hand as if to rest it on Trixie’s shoulder but pulling it back with uncertainty before she ever made contact. 

Katya wasn’t sure how to comfort her in a moment like this, when all of her anger was justified, when they were both eternally walking a tightrope of suicidal ideation because how was any of this  _ worth it? _ What was the point in continuing to try when the odds were so stacked against them? 

Katya picked at her fingernails in her lap while Trixie caught her breath, the cold-chapped skin cracking around her knuckles and a small dot of blood growing at the base of her middle finger. She watched it with a faint fascination, a blemish that would have driven her crazy two years previously but was nothing more than a sign that she was impossibly, miraculously, ridiculously still alive, under that wide, blue sky.  

“Fuck,” Trixie eventually muttered. She shook her head and began wiping her tears away frantically as she stood up. “Motherfucker.”

Katya scrambled to her feet alongside her, wiping the blood from her hand off on the pant leg of her left thigh as gravel crunched under her boots. The sound was almost cacophonous amongst the white noise of breeze through the trees. 

“Where are you going?” She called after Trixie who was already storming away with determined footsteps. 

Trixie turned around and sighed, tears still falling but face stony, confident, strong. 

“I’m giving them a proper fucking burial,” she said with a ferocity that had Katya’s heart hammering in her chest. “Wanna help?”

Katya looked to the van behind Trixie, still in the shadows and covered in pine needles. She could see the faint outline of a body in the front seat, could feel herself begin to imagine who those people were, could sense Trixie’s determination as it made its way into Katya’s own heart. 

“Absolutely.”

Katya couldn’t be sure of how long exactly it took her and Trixie to bury the two strangers on the side of the road, but the sun was setting by the time it was finished.

They stood side by side, a makeshift grave lying below them with two unknown soldiers of a different kind of war, two faces whom they’d never known but would never forget.

Two souls lost in a manner both anticlimactic and unnecessary.

Trixie had stopped crying eventually, but they’d done the work of it in silence. To Katya it felt almost as if that was the only respectful way to do so. There were no last rites to be spoken when the victims had no say in what was said and the survivors had but sinking hearts and fading hopes to give. 

Katya took Trixie’s hand in her own. Because it was pointless being stoic and they both needed the reminder that they were no longer alone. Covered in dirt, exhausted, and a little bit lost, but not alone.

“We should try to get some rest,” Katya said softly to the overturned earth at her feet. “We have a long way to drive tomorrow.” 

“Do you think we’ve got enough gas to make it all the way there?” Trixie asked. Her voice was hoarse with the effort of the words left unspoken. 

“I think we can at least make it to the city,” Katya said as she gently began to pull Trixie towards the van. 

They had bickered about using it as a place to sleep, the stench of death was heavy even if mostly in their heads and there wasn’t exactly a book on the moral protocol for a situation like theirs, but it was cold, and while the strangers had not survived, there was still hope for Trixie and Katya. 

But even after they had managed to settle in, even as she laid there, draped in their ratty blanket in the back of a van that belonged to someone else, Katya couldn’t even begin to comprehend the notion of sleep. 

It was pitch black, but she kept her eyes open, staring at the ceiling with an alertness that hadn’t faded since they’d stumbled into this situation just a few hours earlier. She tried not to think about the lives of the people whom they’d buried, tried to remind herself that they couldn’t have done anything to help them, even if they had arrived days earlier. 

They had been gone long before Trixie and Katya had shown up, and using the resources they’d left behind wasn’t cruel. She had to believe that. 

Katya clutched at the blanket and frayed the edge closest to her chin with tense and shaky fingertips. She was lost in her own head and an ocean of what if’s, only to be brought out of it by the distinct sensation of Trixie shivering beside her. 

It wasn’t a violent shake, not something that should have grabbed her attention had she not already been on high alert, but she turned her head despite the darkness as Trixie released a faint huff of breath. 

Katya felt her heart clench in her chest, knowing that Trixie was most certainly clamoring to come to terms with all the same things Katya was. 

“Cold?” she whispered, barely audible and echoing off the metallic walls at the same time. 

There was a beat, and Katya could practically  _ hear _ Trixie trying to still her own shivering before she sighed. 

“A little,” she breathed with a hoarse voice. Katya nodded to herself before realizing it was in vein in the darkness. 

“Okay, c’mere,” she ultimately replied as she was already scooting closer to Trixie and draping an arm across her midsection. At first Trixie tensed slightly, startled by the sudden contact without being able to see it coming, but immediately melted into Katya’s touch as she wound herself around Trixie’s frame. 

Katya rested her head on Trixie’s shoulder and ran a hand up and down the arm that wasn’t pressed against her torso, creating friction in some feeble attempt at manufacturing their own heat. 

Eventually she slowed down as Trixie stopped shivering, instead just holding her close with her face tucked in against Trixie’s neck, side by side with a matted up pigtail. Katya breathed her in, the scent of dried sweat and dirt and just a hint of pine overwhelming her as she felt Trixie begin running a finger slowly up and down her spine. 

The feeling of it had her shivering for an entirely new reason. 

“What are you thinking?” Katya questioned quietly, because both of them knew there wasn’t any chance of either of them sleeping any time soon. 

“Does it make me terrible,” Trixie started. “If I’m thinking how goddamn lucky we got?”

“No,” Katya said certainly, tucking her face closer into Trixie’s neck. 

“People had to  _ die—” _

“We didn’t kill them, Trixie,” Katya cut off her monologue of guilt. 

“But we’re taking over their lives,” Trixie fired back. “Taking their things as if we have any right.”

Katya took in a deep breath through her nose and let it out slowly at the crack in Trixie’s voice. 

“How much of this stuff do you think belonged to them initially?” Katya asked, noncombatant but trying to make a point. “Anyone who’s still alive at this point has taken things that don’t belong to them, has had to bury people who didn’t deserve to die, has done shit they’re not proud of. But we’re so close,” she reached up and rested a gentle hand on Trixie’s cheek, thumb running across the skin and wiping up tears she hadn’t expected to find. “You’ve gotten us so close.” 

Katya could feel Trixie turn her head, could feel her hold Katya a little bit tighter at that. 

Because they were  _ so close _ to where they wanted to be, they had gone so far and left so many tracks behind them, both individually and together and they were so goddamn close to actually making it. 

Katya thought about just a handful of weeks earlier, to the frostbitten woman breaking down her front door, to the moment she realized the world had ended but left survivors, to the day they’d finally stepped out of that cabin and taken on the world. Together. 

Katya had never believed in God but she thought that maybe Trixie was some sort of angel. 

If anyone in the world was going to be heaven-sent, it was that woman and her big, unwavering heart. 

“I’m glad you decided to come,” Trixie whispered, shattering the silence. “With me. Here.”

Katya let her eyes fall shut as the sound of Trixie’s breath washed over her. 

Katya could feel every molecule of space in between them, was spatially aware of how close they were to one another despite the pitch-black darkness blanketed over them. She had thought for so long that she would survive alone in the After, until she simply couldn’t anymore.

She had decided so early on that a ravaged world wasn’t worth venturing out into, that everyone worth caring for was dead and the rest of them would get to join them soon enough. But in that moment, with her arms wrapped around the woman who had opened her eyes back up, she felt something other than pure survival instincts tie itself up in her veins. 

And so, Katya didn’t even try to stop herself when the urge to kiss Trixie’s jawline came about, pressing her lips gently against the place where her ear met her jaw, the apple of her cheek. Slow, as if they weren’t playing an eternal game against time.  

“Katya,” Trixie breathed and Katya hummed softly against her skin in acknowledgment. 

“Do you want me to stop?” she asked. 

Trixie simply turned her head and stumbled through finding Katya’s lips with her own in the darkness. 

Katya accepted the affection readily, returning it with an eagerness she hadn’t put towards anything save their current journey since the world had gone and fucking ended. She let herself give all of herself to making out with Trixie as she pushed herself up and on top of the other woman. 

Katya let her hands squeeze at Trixie’s waist until Trixie reached down and pulled those same fingers up to her chest, very certainly giving Katya permission to just  _ fucking go for it. _

What really was the point in holding back? They might have been on their way to their own graves for all they knew. 

Katya’s fingers fumbled with the waistband of Trixie’s muddy pants, finding their way under to wind themselves in the stiff curls there and ultimately stroke in between her folds. 

Trixie sighed into the feeling of it and pressed her entire body up against Katya. The whole thing of it was badly timed, potentially disrespectful to the dead, and in poor taste, but it felt like the only thing to be doing in the moment.

Everything was a mess, everything was eternally in wreckage and Katya just wanted to make Trixie feel good. They wanted to make each other feel good after months on end of isolation and fighting and dirt and death and loss. 

And so their hands roamed underneath each other’s clothes, still too cold to take them all the way off but getting warmer every minute that they were pressed up against, around, inside each other. Their moans slipped from swollen tongues and danced in the air above them as the smell of sex heated up the the box of the van like an oven. 

Not a single part of it was sexy.

Not a single bit of it was comfortable as their joints pressed awkwardly into metal structure of the van and their fingers wound into greasy, matted down hair. They both had terrible breath and could barely even remember what a  _ real shower _ felt like, but something about it was comforting nonetheless. 

Trixie came with a high pitched whine as she bit lightly into the muscle of Katya’s shoulder where her jacket had been pushed to the side, and Katya finished with a shaky  _ fuck _ not long after. 

Katya fell back to the side, fly of her pants undone as she stayed close against Trixie’s side. They held each other as they caught their breath and started to come out of their lust-induced trance.

Trixie ultimately broke the uncertain silence that rested over them, heavier than any of the blankets they traveled with.

“Thanks, Barbara,” she deadpanned. 

Katya let out a breath she had been holding with a surprised, high-pitched laugh, which then turned into uncontrollable cackling against the fabric of Trixie’s coat. 

Trixie joined in and they both just kept laughing it off, the tension and the pleasure and the fear and loss and uncertainty, brightening up the stark darkness with their moderately inappropriate laughter. 

Katya pulled Trixie an inch closer and snuggled up against her as they eventually slowed down, started to see the path towards sleep despite their aching joints and broken hearts. 

“Anytime, Jo,” she said softly. “Anytime.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments and messages are always appreciated! thank you for reading!


	5. an apathy lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I know you were asleep ten seconds ago, but I need you to wake up,” Katya said, still without looking away from what she could only really see as a threat stood in their path. “We might have a situation.” 
> 
> Trixie looked to Katya’s face, wide-eyed and tight-lipped, before turning to look out ahead of them. She immediately sat up straighter in her seat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey friends, i didn't realize quite how long it had been since an update until i came to post this. i'm sorry it's been so long and i'm sorry this is so short, my personal life kind of blew up in my face so this isn't a huge priority right now. 
> 
> i love you if you're still reading/ still have any interest in this story, thanks for being patient <3

“You’re not driving.”

“Why not?!” Katya exclaimed indignantly. She leaned against the side of the van with her arms crossed tightly over her chest while Trixie fiddled with something under the dashboard.

“Because  _ I  _ am,” she responded simply, standing up with one foot in the gravel and one on the step into the front seat. 

“I’ll have you know I’m an excellent driver,” Katya fired back. “Top of my class at the driving academy, won a couple drag races with my mom’s minivan in high school.” 

“I seem to remember you mentioning something about crashing into a ditch?” Trixie raised her eyebrows skeptically. 

“Do you happen to also remember the extenuating circumstances of an alien invasion that made me crash into a ditch in that big brain of yours, Joanne?” Katya took a step closer in some sort of failed intimidation tactic. 

“Aliens drove you off the road, huh?” Trixie smirked. She took a step even closer to Katya, making them only a small distance apart, sharing condensing air in the inches between their noses.

“They started a forest fire! There was a tree  _ right in my path,”  _ Katya insisted. 

Trixie didn’t seem to hear her, instead glancing involuntarily down at Katya’s lips in an act that didn’t go unnoticed by the woman in question. It had been but a few mere hours since their roll around in the back of their newly acquired van and neither one of them had bothered to mention it. 

It was good, what had happened between them, and it was safe to say that neither was opposed to an encore performance, but certain other acts of survival had to take precedence. 

Once they found their people, maybe then they could pick up a few more reckless habits, could chase reckless feelings with reckless hands in the dark once more. But for the time being they needed to have each other’s backs and keep each other moving in the right direction. 

Trixie cleared her throat.

“I’m driving,” she said definitively, stepping away and pulling herself up into the driver's seat in one swift motion. 

“Oh, come  _ on!” _ Katya said in an exasperated huff.

“Get in, Barbara,” Trixie managed to say without laughing  _ too _ hard. “We don’t wanna keep ’em waiting!” 

Katya rolled her eyes even though she knew Trixie couldn’t see her, pushed off the side of the van, and made her way to sitting on the passenger’s side, arms still crossed stubbornly in front of her. 

“We’re trading off,” she grumbled. “It’s not safe to drive for more than a couple hours at a time anyway.”

“Sure thing,” Trixie deadpanned, unable to keep a slight smirk off her face. “You’ll get a turn with the big wheel, kiddo.”

Katya just sunk lower into her seat with a groan as Trixie started the engine and lifted her foot off of the brake.

 

_ “Both hands on the wheel, Trix.” _

_ “I know, Mom,” Trixie rolled her eyes under mousy brown bangs in desperate need of a trim.  _

_ “And keep your eyes on the road.” _

_ “That’s what I’m  _ doing _ ,” Trixie huffed at the incessant protectiveness of Laurie Mattel with all the teenage exasperation she could muster.  _

_ “Can we stop at a drive through?” Amelia asked from the backseat.  _

_ “Your sister is learning how to drive,” Laurie looked at her over her shoulder. “Do you really need McDonald’s right now?” _

_ “At any given moment I am in desperate need of chicken nuggets,” Amelia deadpanned. “Are you going to deny me of that?” _

_ “Amelia--” _

_ “I’ve never driven through a take-out window,” Trixie chimed in, grinning at her sister who didn’t have to come along for Trixie’s driving lessons but had insisted. Something to do with the fact that “our mother has lived in the country so long she forgot how to use a turn signal.” _

_ “She’s never driven through a take out window!” Amelia pointed at her sister. _

_ “It’ll be a learning moment!” Trixie said with equal enthusiasm.  _

_ “See, Mom? A learning moment!”  _

_ “I swear,” Laurie sighed. “You two could convince me to move to Antarctica if you teamed up. Turn left up here.” _ _   
_

_ Both of the girls cheered as Trixie directed their family car-- a little bit beat up and requiring a couple of repairs but well-loved by all of them-- on their new trek towards chicken nuggets.  _

_ “Trixie, you’re going five miles under the speed limit,” Amelia said as she peeked over her sister’s shoulder to look at the dashboard.  _

_ “Shut up,” Trixie hissed at her.  _

_ “You can get pulled over for going too slow, you know,” Amelia fired right back. _

_ “No you can’t!” Trixie decidedly would have smacked her sister had she not been studiously keeping both hands on the wheel.  _

_ “Yes you _ can!  _ Tell her, Mom.” _

_ “She’s right, hon,” Laurie said, much to Trixie’s dismay.  _

_ Trixie looked at her mother with disbelief.  _

_ “No way.” _

_ “Just speed up a little so you’re going the actual speed limit--” _

_ “Oh, would you look at that!” Trixie exclaimed as she pulled out of the street and into the McDonald’s parking lot. “We’re here!” _

_ “Good thing you’re already going slow enough for the drive through,” Amelia teased.  _

_ “I’m gonna eat all your fries!” Trixie cried out.  _

_ “You wouldn’t dare! _

_ “I’m gonna eat both of your meals if you don’t calm down!” Laurie said with a burst of laughter that had Trixie and Amelia settling back down almost immediately.  _

_ They were silent for a beat, and then as they sat in front of the menu waiting for someone to take their order, Trixie deadpanned: _

_ “Driving sure is exhausting.” _

 

Katya had never been on a road trip before, at least not a  _ real _ one, with friends and junk food and the same four CDs on repeat for too many hours.

She’d driven long distances, across state lines and back again many times on her own, but never with someone else to share the road. 

A road trip to DC in search of long lost civilization wasn’t exactly what she had in mind for her first trip with her new friend Trixie. There were no snacks, no CDs, and at one point Katya spent forty-five minutes trying to properly fold their map back up. (She would have gone on trying much longer had Trixie not snatched the loud, crinkly paper out of her hands and tossed it into the backseat.)

They tried to fill the silence with talking, endless rambling about nothing and no one of importance. Mindless chatter filled their coffin on wheels until it started to show signs of heaviness too weighty for them to carry on their tongues and they let the quiet hang over them once more. 

It wasn’t until around hour five that they stopped driving for the first time. 

“Why’re we slowing down?” Katya asked, having to clear her throat from lack of use. “You do know the posted speed limits don’t matter anymore?”

“Shut up,” Trixie snorted as she pulled to the side of the road and parked. “I have to pee.”

“Ah,” Katya nodded in understanding as Trixie shut the car off and looked out the window.

Acres of open farmland, covered to the edges with brown overgrowth, dead for the time being but sure to continue its path towards the sky once more in the spring. 

“It’s beautiful,” Trixie sighed. 

“Really?” Katya furrowed her brow at the endless fields around them. 

Trixie hummed noncommittally.

“Just think about what it might’ve looked like if our nation’s leaders hadn’t kidnapped a couple of aliens,” she said offhandedly as she opened the door and hopped out of the car. 

Katya watched her step away, then glanced back out across the land, trying to see it the way Trixie clearly did, trying to see an alternate universe where everything had gone just a little bit smoother after They had made first contact. 

She let out a long breath at the thought of it, too big to maintain any lengthy hold on her tired mind, and hopped out of her seat to stretch her legs. 

“Do you think it would have been different, then?” Katya asked, leaning against the car while Trixie took a piss in the grass a few feet away. The glamor of the apocalypse was astonishing, Katya thought, as she politely averted her gaze. “I mean, if we hadn’t captured Them?”

“Kat, we didn’t just  _ capture _ Them,” Trixie sighed. “We took Them prisoner, performed intense experiments on Them, and all around treated them like cattle.”

Katya bit at the inside of her cheek as Trixie stood up and secured her pants around her waist once more. There was the fleeting thought that maybe, if she had been more politically active in the Before, then there wouldn’t have been an After to survive. There was the even briefer thought, that if Katya had no After, she would also have no Trixie. 

Both made her feel guilty. 

“They were unarmed when they showed up,” Trixie said softly, leaning her shoulder against the side of the van to face Katya’s profile. “They were sentient beings looking to explore a new civilization. Anthropologists, not soldiers.”

Katya couldn’t make eye contact with Trixie, staring out at what had once been home to endless life and was now, quite bluntly, lifeless. She took a deep breath. 

“I should’ve tried to do something,” Katya said, more to herself than anything. “You were at least fighting.”

“Not like it did that much good in the end,” Trixie said with a dry laugh. 

“I don’t know, it might have worked,” Katya furrowed her brow and shook her head. “If we had been loud enough-- I mean, we could’ve shown Them that our leaders didn’t speak for us.”

Trixie studied Katya’s face and chewed on her lower lip for a beat. Katya knew it must have been a familiar sentiment to her companion, that Trixie had no doubt thought the same thing at some point, even if not still. 

Trixie released the tension in her body with a heavy breath and pushed off the side of the car. 

“Drive ‘til sundown, would you?” 

Katya met her gaze, could see that the moment had passed and nodded. 

“Yeah.”

 

_ “Yeah! _

_ “No,” Trixie shook her head emphatically, pigtails with plastic bobbles at the end of her wispy hair swinging back and forth across her shoulders.  _

_ “Come on, Trixie, don’t be a party pooper.” _

_ “It’s mean, Nicole,” Trixie hissed. “You can’t just spread rumors about her.” _

_ Nicole rolled her eyes from the swing next to Trixie’s. Neither of them were actually  _ swinging _ , but instead using the seats available as a spot to have very important fifth grade discussions during recess.  _

_ Including but not limited to how funny it may or may not be to tell people Jamie Sherwood was adopted and her parents might be considering sending her back.  _

_ “You’re such a party-pooper sometimes, Trixie,” Nicole said in the very specific tone of a ten year old who had watched a little bit too much TV, or whose parents gossipped a little too loudly in the next room, or who simply hadn’t learned the difference between right and wrong yet.  _

_ Nicole hopped off of her swing and ran across the playground towards another group of children who didn’t see themselves as children, who were, after all, the oldest they had ever been and assumed they knew everything. You see, they knew everything that they knew and that sometimes feels like the same as knowing everything.  _

_ Trixie stayed on her swing, toes in the pebbles that covered the ground and rocking slowly back and forth. Her small fingers were wrapped tight around the chains and groups of her peers ran boisterously back and forth across the small playground, again and again and again while Trixie just watched.  _

_ She wanted to say something to Jamie Sherwood, but wasn’t sure what, wasn’t sure why or how or when. What about this situation had Trixie feeling hurt? _

_ Nicole wasn’t spreading rumors about Trixie, no one had ever really teased the young girl who was too quiet in class to find a real point of attack, so why did her heart hurt? Why did she so desperately seek to stand up for Jamie Sherwood whom she wasn’t even friends with?  _

_ Trixie didn’t yet know what empathy was, but she didn’t really need to. She was already a fully grown empath at the age of ten. _

_ Later that day, she would lose most of her friends for going to the teacher.  _

_ Later that day, she would start feeling what it was like to be the one who got teased.  _

_ But later that day, she made a friend named Jamie, and maybe that was worth it.  _

 

Katya had always enjoyed driving. 

There was a certain peace to the straight-shot of a highway, and as much as she had always tried to find solace in yoga, she had never found something quite as meditative as a late-night drive down an empty highway. 

And hell if that wasn’t the emptiest highway she’d ever driven on. 

The stars were the brightest she had ever seen them, only competing with the dim headlights on the front of their van, illuminating the hypnotizing, neverending yellow line that would lead them towards whatever pseudo-society awaited them in DC. 

Trixie had dozed off thirty or so minutes prior, and despite instruction to stop when night fell, Katya had kept driving. She could feel how close they were getting in her bones (and could read it on the street signs) and wanted nothing more than for Trixie to wake up to find they were a few hours ahead of schedule. 

Katya glanced over at Trixie periodically, with her right foot propped up on the dashboard and her head bouncing slightly against her knee as she filled the quiet space with the sound of her deep-sleep breathing. 

Katya found herself enamored with the pieces of hair that didn’t quite make it into Trixie’s braids, fond of the dried, cracking mud on the knees of her pants, completely and totally taken with the freckles on her flushed cheeks. 

Twenty-four hours later, Katya could still feel Trixie’s hands in her hair, and it probably had to do with the utter codependence of their partnership, but Katya felt attached to Trixie in ways she never had with another human being. 

Even before the After. 

And so, the way Trixie was a faint silhouette of a woman in the dark kept drawing Katya’s attention back to her, only adding to the peaceful isolation of the path ahead until--

“Oh, fuck,” Katya said as she turned back to looking at the road in front of her. “Holy shit, Trixie-- Trix, wake up,” she shook Trixie gently with one hand as she stepped on the brake and rolled to a stop. 

Right in front of a man. 

“Hmm?” Trixie hummed, rubbing her hands over her face as she sat up. 

Katya could feel her heart racing as she put the van into park, eyes never leaving the figure stood in the middle of their headlights. 

His coat was an army green but covered in mud and his knit cap was pulled down low over his ears. He was tall and looked like the sort of man Katya would have crossed the street to avoid if she had been walking alone. 

He was holding a gun. 

“I know you were asleep ten seconds ago, but I need you to wake up,” Katya said, still without looking away from what she could only really see as a threat stood in their path. “We might have a situation.” 

Trixie looked to Katya’s face, wide-eyed and tight-lipped, before turning to look out ahead of them. She immediately sat up straighter in her seat. 

“Stay in the car,” she said, grabbing her gun out of the glove compartment and checking to make sure it was loaded. 

“What?!” Katya turned to her with a frantic whip of her head. “You’re not going out there. He has a  _ gun, _ Trixie.”

“Yeah, but so do I,” Trixie met her gaze with equal parts confidence and fear. 

“I can off-road a little bit, get past him,” Katya said, even as the man took a slow step towards the car. 

“He might just need help,” Trixie pointed out softly. “He might just be lost and on his own and we might be able to help him--”

“He might try to  _ kill you,” _ Katya insisted. 

“I might have tried to kill you,” Trixie fired back, making Katya’s breath still in her lungs. “But you let me in anyway.”

Katya looked out ahead of the car, hands still gripping the wheel with white knuckles, and let out a tense breath. 

“I’m coming with you--”

“You’re staying in the car,” Trixie cut her off. 

“If things go south--”   


“We’ll need a getaway driver more than anything,” Trixie said, already opening the door and climbing out. “It’s gonna be okay.” 

Katya looked at her and nodded, knowing there was no winning that debate in particular because she could see it in Trixie’s eyes, in the way she held her shoulders. 

Trixie left the door cracked slightly as she moved slowly towards the front of the car, leaving considerable space between her and the stranger but looking far too open and vulnerable for Katya’s liking. 

She could see them talking, but couldn’t hear them past the glass, and her anxiety about the situation just kept building in her heart and lungs and ribs. 

Katya’s leg bounced as she reached behind the seat and grabbed ahold of her shotgun while keeping her eyes on the scene in front of her, pulling it into her lap below the dashboard and hoping their new friend couldn’t see past the bright lights in his eyes. 

She watched Trixie tuck her gun into the waistband of her pants at the center of her back, putting up her hands as if to try and show she wasn’t a threat. 

Katya thought maybe she should continue to be threatening until they knew for sure this guy wasn’t out to off them and take everything they had to their names. Something about the entire situation made her queasy. 

The man looked aggressive, and it might have just been her imagination but the deepening furrow of his brow was distinct in the yellow light and the way he looked down at Trixie made Katya wish she had driven away before Trixie ever had the chance to take a step outside the safety of their vehicle. 

And then he motioned to the van. Broadly, with strong arms that Katya knew could overpower them both in a minute. 

Trixie glanced over her shoulder at the van, and Katya saw the world shift into slow motion like she was in some sort of fucking action film. 

The stranger cocked his gun and lifted it to point at Trixie before she had even turned back to look at him.

In one simultaneous motion, Trixie reached for her gun and Katya stumbled out of the van with her shotgun raised in shaky hands. 

Katya had always hated slow motion action sequences, and now she’d found herself trapped in one. Bullshit. 

“Don’t!” the man warned, forcing Trixie to raise her hands in surrender as she stared down the barrel of his firearm. 

“I’d hand that gun over if I were you,” Katya said in what she hoped was her most intimidating  _ don’t-fuck-with-me _ voice, but probably just acted as the first sign of how scared she was. 

Despite having survived the apocalypse for as long as she had, she’d never actually fired a gun, never killed a living thing whether human or alien, never had to do more than hand over some resources to raiders and move on with her life. 

“I told you to stay in the car,” Trixie grumbled without turning her head. 

“Not the time, Jo,” Katya fired right back, wondering if she was a good shot for the first time in her life. Maybe beginner’s luck would be on her side, but it didn’t seem likely. 

“Shut up,” the man chimed in, clearly annoyed that the two of them were making this even remotely difficult for him. As if he thought they’d be easy to break. “This is what’s gonna happen. Pigtails here is gonna set her gun down on the ground and slide it over to me, the driver is gonna leave  _ her _ gun on the front seat of that there van, and I’m gonna drive away before any of us gotta get hurt. Understand?”

“Dude, we outnumber you,” Katya said. “Give it up. Just put your gun down and we’ll be on our way.”

“Outnumber me?” he snorted. “I’ve got a gun to Miss  _ let-us-help-you _ ’s head over here.”

“Are you--” Katya floundered. “Did you  _ seriously?” _

“It felt appropriate at the  _ time,  _ Barbara,” Trixie insisted. 

“Jesus Christ,” Katya muttered to herself, momentarily forgetting that they were in mortal fucking peril because the most important woman in her life was a godforsaken idiot. 

“Shut up!” he yelled, voice ringing out accompanied by a single, earth-shattering shot he sent into the sky before training his gun right back at Trixie. 

Katya’s heart jumped out of her chest and ran a marathon before returning to its home in her ribs where it could stutter and falter as she tightened her grip on her shotgun. 

“Calm down, man,” Trixie said simply, but Katya could see the slight tremble in her hands. “We’re all on the same side here.”

He snorted at that, a mocking and surprised sort of laugh that made Katya’s blood boil. 

“The only thing similar about us is--”

“That we’re human!” Trixie cut him off abruptly, insistently. “That we’re still here--”

She was cut off by the butt of that man’s gun as it made contact with her jaw, sending her tumbling backwards away from her own shadow and sideways onto the asphalt. 

Before Katya even had the chance to think it through, before she could consider her own actions outside of  _ protecting Trixie, _ she was squeezing the trigger on her shotgun and a bullet was whizzing past the man, startling him just enough to stagger slightly. 

“You bitch,” he growled, cocking his gun as Trixie tried to push herself numbly off the ground.

“Fuck,” Katya muttered to herself as he raised his gun to point at her. 

She didn’t have long to think, didn’t have long to pray, and didn’t have long to aim before she was firing her gun once more at the exact same moment that a shot rang out from the barrel of his as well.

His left shoulder jerked awkwardly and the way he collapsed to the ground was as if he was nothing more than a rag doll, a puppet whose strings had been cut loose. 

Katya heard her own gun clattering against the ground by her feet before she felt herself drop it, unable to take her eyes off of his motionless form for a beat before she was rushing towards him. 

“Shit, shit, shit,” she said, tears already in her eyes and hands shaking as she fell to her knees next to him. 

“Katya,” Trixie’s voice was frantic, trembling. 

“He can’t be dead, I didn’t mean— I didn’t mean to kill him—”

“Katya,” Trixie said more insistently, crouching down next to her. “Katya, you’re—”

“I didn’t think—” Katya continued, hands pressing down on the ever growing, ever blooming rose of blood on his chest. “We need to—”

“Kat, you’re bleeding,” Trixie cut her off finally.

“It’s his blood,” Katya responded, watching it ooze, deep red between her fingers. “We have to— we gotta stop the bleeding—”

“Hey, stop,” Trixie said, voice filled with a shaky determination. “Stop, look at me,” Trixie put her hands on either side of Katya’s face and pulled her gaze away from the man in front of them. 

“Trixie…” she breathed, tears streaming through dirt on her cheeks and hands sticky with someone else’s blood.

“You got shot in the leg, I need you to let me help you,” Trixie said.

“But—” Katya started to turn to look back at the body but Trixie held her head tight to keep her from staring. 

“No,” she croaked. “Look at your thigh.”

Katya did as she was told, a numbness fading quickly from her brain and body as she took in the bright red wound right there in front of her. In her own thigh, pouring more blood than she knew was healthy out onto the asphalt and staining the yellow paint. 

“Fuck,” she muttered, suddenly aware of the pain that her adrenaline-flooded consciousness hadn’t quite acknowledged up until that moment. “I got  _ shot _ — what the fuck.”

“Sit back, leg straight,” Trixie urged her as she took off her own coat and flannel, beginning to tear the blue fabric into uneven strips. 

Katya sat back on her ass with both legs straight in front of her, gaze bouncing between the dead man next to her and her own injury. She knew she was in shock, could feel it in the way all of her movement felt outside her control and Trixie’s voice sounded too far away. 

“I’m gonna try to slow the bleeding down,” Trixie said gently as she wrapped a few strips of what was once one of her necessary warmth layers around Katya’s leg. “This might hurt,” she said, but she was already pulling the knot tight and Katya was already wincing at the feeling of it. 

“Go fuck yourself,” Katya said on instinct as Trixie pulled the makeshift tourniquet as tight as it would go. 

“Sure thing,” Trixie said absentmindedly as she put her own coat back on and stood up, striding over to Katya’s gun and slinging it around her back before returning to Katya’s side. “We gotta keep moving,” she leaned over and put an arm around Katya as if to help her up but Katya pushed her away. 

“No, we can’t leave yet,” Katya shook her head frantically. “We have to bury him.”

“Katya, don’t—”

“We buried the others!” Katya pushed Trixie away as she tried once more to pull her to her feet. “He deserves—”

“We don’t have  _ time,”  _ Trixie insisted. 

“We can make time—”

“He tried to kill you, Katya.”

“I don’t— we can’t just— just leave him—”

“Hey,” Trixie said, voice softer as she crouched down next to Katya, one hand on her shoulder and the other brushing tears away from her cheek. “He’s gone—”

“I killed him—”

“He’s gone,” Trixie pressed on. “And you did the right thing, okay? You were just protecting us, you have to know that.”

Katya took a deep breath, trying to slow her own tears and scrubbing at the blood on her hands in some feeble effort to rid herself of the red stain. 

“Katya,” Trixie said once more, grabbing Katya’s hands in her own to stop the frantic movement. “You’re losing a lot of blood and you’re gonna need a doctor.”

“You’re a doctor,” Katya said but Trixie rolled her eyes. 

“A medical doctor. Let’s go,” she begged, concern radiating off of her in buckets. “Please.” 

Katya looked her right in the eye, at the fear there as Trixie glanced down at Katya’s injury. Katya let out a breath and nodded, wrapping an arm across Trixie’s shoulders and bending her good leg to put her weight on that foot. 

It was a strange feeling for Katya as Trixie helped her hobble back to the van and into the passenger seat, not because she had gotten shot and not because she had been in some sort of genuine Wild West shootout, but because she  _ cared. _

Suddenly, or not so suddenly if she really thought about it, Katya cared whether or not she survived. Katya cared that she might bleed out and Katya cared that she might not continue to live in that mixed up, broken down, sad excuse for a world.

Katya didn’t want to die, because Katya had something, somewhere, and maybe most notably, someone worth sticking around for in a direct combat against comfortable apathy. 

“We’re gonna make it,” Katya said, a certain calm in her voice as Trixie climbed into the driver's seat and shifted the gear. 

Trixie looked to her and their eyes met with trust and fear and hope and maybe just a little bit of love. 

“You fucking better,” she said, before pulling forward into the dark street and stepping on the gas. “No falling asleep on me either.”

In response, Katya just placed a hand on Trixie’s knee and squeezed, some sort of hopeful reassurance that she was going to be okay despite the lingering likelihood that she wouldn’t. 

Trixie let one hand fall on top of Katya’s and intertwined their blood-stained fingers without looking away from the road ahead. 

Katya felt dizzy and as she settled into her seat the pain only got worse, but she wasn’t about to give up.

Not anymore. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading <3 
> 
> (comments are always v appreciated if you're about that)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! 
> 
> let me know what you think here or on tumblr ( @ourforgottenboleros ) <3


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